That's an otterly different name!
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2025
103 points (98.1% liked)
Selfhosted
52449 readers
1132 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
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:
- Voice chat - It seems like this is coming, but they had to clean up a bunch or tech debt first
- 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.
what's really federation on a system that isolates conversations per server? can you reply to a message from one server on another? maybe the main thing would be single account, because even friend lists from multiple accounts could be merged
what's really federation on a system that isolates conversations per server?
That's like asking why Lemmy needs federation if posts are tied to a Community.
No federation means:
- Every server requires a different user account to join a room
- Every server needs to be accessed from a different URL
- Users in different servers cannot direct message, call, or friendlist one another
Federated platforms aren't perfect, but they solve these problems.
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
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.
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.
If there's no voice channels, then why reinvent IRC?
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.
Compared to some other alternatives, I think the thing it really has going for it is how simple it is. It's really a drop in replacement for discord, something I actually think maybe my friends that don't really care about Foss would consider switching to. They've told me they don't want to take the time to learn a new messaging software, I don't think they'd have to with this.
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).
is this a genuine question?
Wait when I tested revolt a few months ago they definitely had voice channels - was that a beta feature?
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.
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.
Why not any of the other Matrix clients? I've got some friends on Element with some bridges and it's pretty much perfect.
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.
I like things named after animals!
Thanks for making me realize the name is not just gibberish
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).
"Riot" the old name of their webclient
I mean, by that logic discord has a much more likely claim.
do you think they would spend their little money on this?
You mean the multiple millions of VC money and crypto investments? Absolutely.
The Matrix foundation also would have plenty of money if it wasn't just a front for Element and most funds being siphoned off to pay for services provided by Element.
Yeah I would assume if anything they would have helped them bring federation
Not sure if that is still in their FAQ, but the Stoat devs previously said that they don't want federation, and if that ever changes they would likely prefer XMPP over Matrix.
They said they were open to it but they had zero priority of doing it themselves, and essentially "submit a PR if you want it". A shame really, their interface is great, and such an easy setup. If they implemented either xmpp or matrix I would switch immediately. All of my friends want a discord clone that "just" works, but no one wants to go to this server for this group and then login to that server for that group. They want a single-pane interface like what discord offers.
Shortsighted to not implement that IMO.
I know trademarks don't work that way, but imagine if it was actually Revolut, the fintech company
Somewhere on Lemmy someone said it came out that it was Revolt.tv
But yeah, I honestly would constantly type Revolut instead of Revolt before, so that was my guess before too.