Finally got around to checking out Revolt Chat. It's basically a Free Code Discord clone. If they were going to federate with other chat servers, matrix is probably the best choice, given it's a room-orientated UX and needs a concept like Spaces. If anyone thinks that Revolt could be federated with XMPP, I'd be interested to hear some details on how that would work.
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As you may have heard, Discord alternative Revolt has been renamed Stoat;
https://stoat.chat/updates/long-live-stoat
Stoat is designed as a centralised service. So in theory the operators could sell it to Discord, or Xitter, or anyone, at any time.
To be clear, they show no signs of doing so, and claim they're getting plenty of donations to cover costs. But this was true with Gitea ... until it wasn't. Devs with control over the project accepted VC money, leading to the Forgejo fork.
(1/?)
The claims in this post are from a blog post written by one of the devs of Fermi, a client for Stoat competitor Spacebar. I haven't fact-checked this yet, so take with a grain of salt;
https://blog.fermi.chat/discordAlts/revolt/
They said although it's technically possible to self-host Stoat, the client apps are hardcoded to point to stoat.chat, not your instance. Also a bunch of the code it depends on is under proprietary (Source Available?) licenses, and can be hard to find, as it's not all in one repo.
(2/?)
There's a massive opportunity here, for someone to build a UX that would be comfortable for someone used to Discord. 100% Free Code, and connected to a federated server that can provide all the necessary functionality. Whether that's using;
* XMPP for interop with the Jabber network,
* Meg/Olm for interop with Matrix rooms
* ActivityPub for interop with the forumverse (Lemmy, PieFed, Discourse, nodeBB, etc).
* Something else(?)
(3/?)
It could be fun to have a friendly competition where one team designed a Discord-a-like UX and interface, maybe using PenPot. Then a team from each protocol camp put together the apps and server using their preferred protocol. Reusing existing components would speed things up, like an AP team building the apps as clients for a fork of the Lemmy server.
Throw everything at the wall and see what sticks!
(4/4)
@strypey We're moving forward with end-to-end encrypted messaging over ActivityPub. https://github.com/swicg/activitypub-e2ee/ MLS, the encryption technology, was meant to scale to hundreds of thousands of people, but my guess is that AP E2EE chats will more likely scale to the more personal handful, max a couple of dozen. I don't think it's a Discord replacement, but it's in the mix.
@evan
> We're moving forward with end-to-end encrypted messaging over ActivityPub
I'm aware and watching with interest.
> I don't think it's a Discord replacement, but it's in the mix
As @reiver pointed out in a post I replied to earlier, E2EE is not needed by the majority of communities leaving Discord, who use it more like a web forum than a chat room system. Even if their Discord "server" is not public, it's not necessarily sensitive enough to need the overhead of E2EE.
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@evan @strypey Because we don't already have enough incompatible interpersonal electronic messaging systems, huh? 😲 https://bookofadamz.com/the-smartest-messaging-method-is-not-a-segregated-mess-of-whatsapp-signal-telegram-sms-slack-teams-facebook-instagram-wechat-etc/
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