Here's a big change. Long Live Stoat! - Stoat
stoat.chat
After four years of building Revolt, we're rebranding to Stoat to better reflect our mission and community.

Stoat (formerly known as Revolt) is a selfhostable, FOSS replacement for discord [Group chats and voice channels you can join any time].

Cool new name, however not as easy to use in other languages.

Voice chat is stil not officialy implemented.

Self-hosting there. Apparently nothing to do for you if you had already hosted before the name change.

The Android app has unfortunately disappeared (not been updated) on F-droid.

Edit: added short description for clarification

  • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.worldEnglish
    24·
    5 months ago

    I looked at the website and every link and have no idea what it does.

    “Connect with your friends and community” was in a screenshot.

    • Alfredolin@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      17·
      5 months ago

      Ah! If you have never heard of it I can tell you: it’s the foss, self-hostable equivalent of Discord. Except we are still waiting for the voice channels.

        • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          6·
          5 months ago

          There’s a wide gap of stuff one can do between IRC and “chat with voice channels”. For example, having a better protocol with better formatting options, a moderation API, better account management, other forms of multimedia (page embeds, images).

        • Jayjader@jlai.luEnglish
          2·
          5 months ago

          Syntax highlighting for code blocks is the reason I prefer discord over slack for collaborating and just chatting with friends who know how to code. I imagine some irc clients exist that so the same, but at least with discord I know my recipient is guaranteed to see what I see.

      • papertowels@mander.xyzEnglish
        3·
        5 months ago

        Wait when I tested revolt a few months ago they definitely had voice channels - was that a beta feature?

        • Alfredolin@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
          7·
          5 months ago

          Yes it needs extra steps if you are selfhosting and is not supported in the third party app clerotri for example. It seemed an hassle enough that I did not try it on my selfhosted instance.

          • papertowels@mander.xyzEnglish
            4·
            5 months ago

            Gotcha that does match my impression.

            You’re right though, there’s value in it being a drop-in replacement for discord. Along those lines, I’m very excited for cinny, a matrix discord-like frontend. There’s a PR for voice calls that I check every now and then, the moment that goes in I’ll be trying to convince my friends to hop over.

            • null@piefed.nullspace.lolEnglish
              1·
              5 months ago

              Why not any of the other Matrix clients? I’ve got some friends on Element with some bridges and it’s pretty much perfect.

              • papertowels@mander.xyzEnglish
                2·
                5 months ago

                The UI of the ones I’ve tried (schildichat, fluffy, element) felt very unintuitive to me. Spaces were really awkward because it was a different paradigm.

                I’m hoping that the familiarity of cinny will help with wider adoption.

  • renegadespork@lemmy.jelliefrontier.netEnglish
    11·
    5 months ago

    This seems like a cool project. I especially love the UI’s similarity to Discord, but it still has a long road ahead to be a viable chat platform IMO.

    I’ve been periodically checking in with Revolt Stoat for about a year now, and personally, the two things that I’m waiting for are:

    1. Voice chat - It seems like this is coming, but they had to clean up a bunch or tech debt first
    2. Federation - Self-hosted chat is great, but not being able to talk to other servers is incredibly limiting for a social tool. AFAIK they’re not planning on implementing this. This is likely a deal-breaker for a lot of folks.

    I’m currently running Matrix synapse, and while matrix is kinda a messy ecosystem, it’s really hard to compete with its maturity and adoption in the FOSS / Self-Hosted space.

    Also, not super important, but this blog post reads like it’s AI generated.

    • magz :3@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      2·
      5 months ago

      i honestly think that if revolt had federation, then it would be the obvious choice for me, but alas. personally i’m still hopeful for polyproto getting off the ground, but the boring realistic choice for the time being is probably something like XMPP + mumble

        • magz :3@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          0·
          5 months ago

          oh yea their website seems to be down. surely a good sign… in the meantime, you can look at the website/spec through their codeberg repos.

          i’m not a huge fan of matrix because it seems very bad to selfhost. from my understanding, if anyone using your homeserver joins a big channel, your homeserver will have to store the entire history of that channel and keep it up to date. on top of that, it very much seems like the spec isn’t being developed by the community, but more that element implements some feature and then forces that into the spec. also polyproto claims to be much more resilient, allowing you to migrate to a new homeserver, even if your old one is already dead.

          also a lot of matrix’s funding comes from crypto, ai and venture capital, so i think it’s just a matter of time before the whole project becomes completely subsumed by capital interests

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
    12·
    5 months ago

    I wonder who made the legal threats. I suspect it was Element (Matrix), as they are the only ones with a possible to confuse trademark in the same business sector (“Riot” the old name of their webclient).

    • papertowels@mander.xyzEnglish
      6·
      5 months ago

      “Riot” the old name of their webclient

      I mean, by that logic discord has a much more likely claim.

    • 8osm3rka@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      5 months ago

      I know trademarks don’t work that way, but imagine if it was actually Revolut, the fintech company