This post is part of a series of posts about viable alternatives to discord. You can check the #discordAlternatives tag above for all blogposts in this series.

Revolt is a pretty young, centralized platform initially started as a hobby project by Insert sometime in (I believe) 2020 to see if they could build a clone of Discord. Pretty simple goals.

Over time it grew, insert had a couple more friends join for moderation and development, and now there is a small team working on it in their free time—including an Android app and soon an iOS app And whilst I certainly see the connection between seeking an alternative to Discord and Revolt...I don't see how anyone would recommend Revolt today as an alternative for communities, especially large ones. Quite frankly, the platform is not built out in some key ways yet for it to really be viable for most communities, especially those that like to meet up regularly

So, let's go over what I think is still missing before I can recommend it personally, shall we?

Voice and Video chat

This has been a long one for Revolt, with initial work on, well, re-working that entire part of Revolt happening in the backend in...2023? 2024?

Either way, reworking this has been on the roadmap for a long time, as there is technically speaking a Voice Chat feature but it is very rudimentary, kind of buggy, and entirely nonexistent on the mobile apps

That said, the plan is to have voice & video out by the time the new Web/Desktop client releases, which is gonna take a while still as Insert needs to find the time to actually be able to do that

Pinned messages

Currently, Revolt has no concept of pinned messages. Well, maybe in the API, I remember hearing something about that, but definitely not in any of the clients. As such I am gonna say that pinned messages simply aren't a thing on Revolt as of right now, which is kind of a bummer as a small yet still very frequently used feature.

I guess this one could be lived without...for however long it's gonna take still

End-To-End-Encryption

The main reason I am including this here is because quite frankly it's been quite some time since this has been on the roadmap and, sadly, there is a lack of transparency in especially this part unless you happen to catch one of the developers in the official Revolt community

Effectively, this was confirmed to become a killer feature a while back (like, literal years) and since then not much has happened. Really, huge features like this probably shouldn't be confirmed until you've got even a vague idea of what's gonna happen. Or if you do have a vague idea of what's gonna happen, be transparent about it in the context of an Open-Source project.

API-Only features

For some reason, some features still haven't made it past the “we have it in the API!” stage despite being used a lot on the platform.

Masquerade

Masquerade has technically been a thing for a while now, but only really usable if you installed a specific plugin with the current/old web/desktop client.

It allows you to define a profile per-message, e.g having a different profile or avatar for just one message

This is especially useful to plural systems, but also for bridge bots and the likes, and the fact that it was added and supposed to come at some point and just never did is kinda disappointing. At least it can be used via the API I guess...?

Gradient role colours

Another feature that only made it to the API and never the Clients/UI is gradient role colours. Not an essential thing, but it is weird how all clients can display it and none can configure it. You'll HAVE to use the API to get gradient role colours, or some bot.

Spam on the platform

Another issue is that right now, there are no robust anti-spam or anti-flood measures built-in to the platform. There is AutoMod, maintained by a Revolt contributor, but it isn't built-in functionality and as such only discoverable at worst when something has already gone wrong.

But, worse than that, their servers regularly get DDoSed, leaving the platform unresponsive. And when they aren't getting DDoSed, the most common part to break is their CDN / Media service.

Point is, most unpleasant to anyone that tries to run and moderate a community. At least the tools that exist actually exist and work unlike certain other projects, but it's not good either.

Small Stuff

Here is just a collection of small nitpicks that I wanted to include but don't warrant their own entire sections.

• Still no way to see where an emote came from; Android app only lets you do this if you're already in a guild
• You cannot put guilds into folders, making it really annoying to be in many of them—especially if you're just in there for emotes
• No way to index outside of Revolt—Content here will be stuck inside guilds. Discord has the same issue and third-party indexers are NOT helping.
• Lots of features are in theory ready, but held back by missing client rewrites and updates
• The only channel type, not counting the upcoming Voice/Video channels, is text. Whilst I'm not for making un-indexable pseudo-forums, having threads-only channels is still useful for support communities and alike; inevitably hosting a forum takes a server and money. We live in an age of (cg)NATs.

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This post is part of a series of posts about viable alternatives to discord. You can check the #discordAlternatives tag above for all blogposts in this series.

Matrix is, nowadays, one of the most recommended “Discord Alternatives”, especially if your audience resides on the Fediverse where one half will absolutely hate it, and the other much louder half will be those that believe in Matrix for one reason or another. And I get it! It is federated, replicates and decentralizes data¹ has tons of servers and a corporate entity behind it that provides it with funding...is what some would say

The reality is, matrix lacks funding², lacks moderation tools, lacks spec-compliant clients, has hundreds of open MSCs with important changes that can impact the ecosystem as a whole, make it more secure, more robust, more reliable, safer for everyone

In real-life scenarios, projects have had to give up Matrix entirely—despite self-hosting and despite having a moderation bot—because the abuse that is happening on the platform is simply too large. Projects like Librewolf are regularly getting spammed with literally illegal material—the same reason other projects simply left—and have to fight against this for themselves.

They cannot restrict who can send media, they cannot setup any raid protection, federation is simply too slow for anyone to react in time, including bots, which aren't even fast enough either. There is also no way to filter events before things happen because a malicious server could easily just patch out this filter.

In other words, moderation is probably one of Matrix's largest weakpoints. It makes it absolutely unsuitable for any even moderately sized community, especially those that are potentially already vulnerable (i.e queer communities). Yet somehow it still gets worse, on a more technical level.

Due to how Matrix is designed, servers that participate in a room (i.e users from different servers all talking in the same room) have to do state resolution to figure out what the current state is. This is because there is no “owner” to a room in the sense of “a server where all the data resides”, all servers have that role and as such they require a mechanism that allows them to synchronize this data. The algorithm however is brittle and far from perfect. When a fatal error happens, it often happens that two participating rooms get different state, and as such...

State Resets

A state reset is when one or more servers decides to reset their state back to a “known-good” point. This leads to any state changes done since then, like membership, permissions and more being entirely undone up to the point that effectively, they never existed.

This is of course a major issue, as it means that any moderation done up to a given point is effectively undone. It makes people unable to communicate properly with those who aren't also on their server, and that is just the start.

Especially when many changes to state happen frequently across many servers, state resets become more common. Like, you know, when trying to moderate.

To this comes a whole host of features that Matrix is simply lacking.

• Up until recently, there was no native VoIP, only Jitsi, and Element Call is still not enabled by default unless you're using Element X on a mobile device. But Element X is considered unfinished so...
• Good, platform-wide (e.g widely supported in apps/clients) support for custom Emoji and Stickers. Element still lags behind here and the relevant MSC(s) still isn't/aren't merged.
• Scheduled Messages.
• Content Warnings and/or Spoilers for media. There is an MSC, to my knowledge only Cinny supports it.
• Multiple attachments (i.e images) per message. Not a single client supports this.
• Portable Identities—i.e not being stuck on one server and having to move everything manually. There are MSCs about this, none are implemented anywhere.
• Metadata Privacy. Currently lots of metadata is still available to a given server that really should not be, like replies and other relationship events (e.g Emoji Reactions, which are never encrypted.)
• Profile Descriptions. There simply are none, you cannot add any extra information to your profile apart from a timezone in some recent versions of Element and Gomuks(-web). Some clients may also support status, but the largest homeserver (matrix.org) has that entire feature disabled.
• Proper message forwarding. Some clients may support this but they effectively only copy/paste a message into a different chat. There is not even any indication that it's been forwarded.
• Sharing live location.

On top of all the above missing features, some of the already existing features are not even consistently implemented between clients.

Some STILL don't show media captions, Element X (the in-beta mobile rewrite) cannot display custom emoji at all, and NO ONE can decide how to do text formatting properly (seriously, maybe <br> shouldn't be usable y'know?), some implement MatrixRTC and others stick to legacy VoIP, some have widgets and some don't... And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Seriously I've barely scratched the surface of weird inconsistencies between clients–I dare you to find one client that implements the spec 100% accurately, and mind you, it's NOT Element.

My final point is that, essentially, Matrix is—as it stands—simply not suited for anything serious especially when it comes to hosting communities. Notice how I didn't even touch on the unable to decrypt meme that often goes around...that would've opened a whole new can of worms

If matrix wants to become viable, it must find the funding and invest into some core areas of the protocol that are quite frankly, broken. This includes not just moderation and T&S³, but also finding solutions on reliable key exchange even when the wider network is unreliable, finding solutions to “split-brained” rooms and state resets, getting (security) audits from the get-go and not just after an unaudited library was used and recommended for years. The list goes on, there is a lot of issues to unpack and tackle.

Oh also, I KNOW THAT THERE ARE MSCs TO FIX SOME OF THESE THINGS. Shut up. I've heard too much about it already, infact I tried writing some in the past and most of them ended up dead before I even submitted them

1: Well, to some extent. One notable exception is how Media is not decentralized. 2: Especially now that the Matrix Foundation wants to fund everything themselves and not have their bills paid by Element anymore. 3: Trust and Safety

↓ it'd mean a lot if you supported my work ↓

https://liberapay.com/cyrneko https://ko-fi.com/cyrneko Any little bit helps <3