I’ve heard of Zulip but never actually bothered to visit their website. Seems cool, but looks to be a Slack alternative rather than a Discord alternative.
To some there is no difference. But to me personally Discord exudes a more casual laid-back energy. If that.. Makes any sense.
When they say “built on the same technologies as other popular chat apps,” what do they mean? The web page mentions “privacy” a lot but doesn’t say anything specific about it. Neither do the GitHub repos’ READMEs, unless I missed something.
To me, “privacy” means my messages aren’t going to be stored on the admin’s server, given that a lot of the time I’d probably not have any particular trust in said admin or their competence at setting up e.g. a MongoDB server without public access open to the world.
Looks like its not really private at all. There’s no encryption. Its just self hosted.
So the privacy they’re talking about is the de facto gains of hosting it yourself or by a person you trust and not a big company like discord or guilded that sells your data
If a malicious actor was watching your traffic somehow, like over coffeehouse WiFi or w/e then your messages being sent aren’t any less secret or safe. That’s no better than discord is today though.
If you want encrypted rooms I guess you gotta stick with matrix but what appeals to me about revolt is my friends might actually try it because it feels like discord. Unlike matrix
If I run discord from the browser it’s a https site, so plaintext should not be accessible from the wire.
I can’t imagine the “native” app works any differently.
There’s degrees of privacy. A self-hoster will probably not sell traffic/usage data to advertisers, but there’s absolutely not guarantees they won’t snoop on private messages/images. This can happen in a big org like Discord but there’s a higher chance that such behavior is monitored and caught - if nothing else for the massive reputational risk of it being exposed.
It’s also a practical thing. Matrix per default also doesn’t doesn’t e2e encrypt everything at all, depending on some circumstances, same goes for IRC. And that’s fine, it allows for very performant full text search and sync (which is also certainly eco friendlier). Telegram (the chat program) didn’t win because of its encryption, it won because of its features, usability and speed. And if I look at day to day usage of discord I’m certain you don’t need e2e here, you may tell people upfront that for e2e worthy content they should choose something else than a glorified gaming slack with video + audio and nice icons, but that’s it.
I’m currently adding some online sync to my own f-droid app, it also won’t have any e2e features. TLS it is, and if you’re distrusting me, you can host your own instance as easy as running some binary on your own VPS.
Matrix per default also doesn’t e2e encrypt anything
That’s wrong, Matrix (more specifically Element, the reference client implementation, previously called Riot) has been encrypting private chats by default for over a year now.
I asked in the beta instance (devs are in there) and it looks like that e2ee roadmap item is for DMs and small group chats, not the discord-like ““servers”” within your instance
To each their own but IMHO this can be okay depending on the circumstances.
Example: I hang out a lot in a Slack where there’s ≈2000 persons in #general. So it’s basically as private as Twitter. To me that’s fine – but I would perhaps not tell all the secrets of my heart in that Slack. But having a discussion about Go or Python or whatever is cool with me, I don’t consider those topics private.
Even if that chat room was end-to-end-encrypted I still would not consider it private. Anyone of those members could copy my messages or take screenshots and spread it to God-knows-where.
Mostly WebSockets. Which is pretty much a given for any browser-based chat product. But I suppose with Rustaceans that might not be the case, since in theory you could create your own socket protocol and communicate over a Wasm client… :)
I stumbled across this today. Looks like its been in development for about 9 months now. I have an account on the beta server and hope to set up my own soon. Surprisingly slick.
This might be the discord-like self hosted solution matrix just isn’t.
It does have an interesting crate choice. Different solutions for websockets and REST API, using async-std but then reqwest too, which uses tokio underneath ?
Seeing that name, I fully expected a new Rust take on https://rvgl.re-volt.io , the OpenGL port of Re-Volt.
Anyhow, it’s always great to see someone tackle big communication providers in a FOSS flavor.
Zulip is open source, self-hostable, and is already used by many open source projects:
https://zulip.com/
https://github.com/zulip
I’ve heard of Zulip but never actually bothered to visit their website. Seems cool, but looks to be a Slack alternative rather than a Discord alternative.
To some there is no difference. But to me personally Discord exudes a more casual laid-back energy. If that.. Makes any sense.
When they say “built on the same technologies as other popular chat apps,” what do they mean? The web page mentions “privacy” a lot but doesn’t say anything specific about it. Neither do the GitHub repos’ READMEs, unless I missed something.
To me, “privacy” means my messages aren’t going to be stored on the admin’s server, given that a lot of the time I’d probably not have any particular trust in said admin or their competence at setting up e.g. a MongoDB server without public access open to the world.
Looks like its not really private at all. There’s no encryption. Its just self hosted.
So the privacy they’re talking about is the de facto gains of hosting it yourself or by a person you trust and not a big company like discord or guilded that sells your data
If a malicious actor was watching your traffic somehow, like over coffeehouse WiFi or w/e then your messages being sent aren’t any less secret or safe. That’s no better than discord is today though.
If you want encrypted rooms I guess you gotta stick with matrix but what appeals to me about revolt is my friends might actually try it because it feels like discord. Unlike matrix
If I run discord from the browser it’s a https site, so plaintext should not be accessible from the wire.
I can’t imagine the “native” app works any differently.
There’s degrees of privacy. A self-hoster will probably not sell traffic/usage data to advertisers, but there’s absolutely not guarantees they won’t snoop on private messages/images. This can happen in a big org like Discord but there’s a higher chance that such behavior is monitored and caught - if nothing else for the massive reputational risk of it being exposed.
It’s also a practical thing. Matrix
per default also doesn’tdoesn’t e2e encrypt everythingat all, depending on some circumstances, same goes for IRC. And that’s fine, it allows for very performant full text search and sync (which is also certainly eco friendlier). Telegram (the chat program) didn’t win because of its encryption, it won because of its features, usability and speed. And if I look at day to day usage of discord I’m certain you don’t need e2e here, you may tell people upfront that for e2e worthy content they should choose something else than a glorified gaming slack with video + audio and nice icons, but that’s it.I’m currently adding some online sync to my own f-droid app, it also won’t have any e2e features. TLS it is, and if you’re distrusting me, you can host your own instance as easy as running some binary on your own VPS.
That’s wrong, Matrix (more specifically Element, the reference client implementation, previously called Riot) has been encrypting private chats by default for over a year now.
Ok then my work instance simply doesn’t use E2E in their rooms. But we’re using it longer than matrix has e2e and we’ve not adopted it for that.
The roadmap at least does mention E2EE as a possibility in future, s. https://revolt.chat/roadmap#features-4, potentially scroll down to see:
I asked in the beta instance (devs are in there) and it looks like that e2ee roadmap item is for DMs and small group chats, not the discord-like ““servers”” within your instance
To each their own but IMHO this can be okay depending on the circumstances.
Example: I hang out a lot in a Slack where there’s ≈2000 persons in
#general. So it’s basically as private as Twitter. To me that’s fine – but I would perhaps not tell all the secrets of my heart in that Slack. But having a discussion about Go or Python or whatever is cool with me, I don’t consider those topics private.Even if that chat room was end-to-end-encrypted I still would not consider it private. Anyone of those members could copy my messages or take screenshots and spread it to God-knows-where.
Mostly WebSockets. Which is pretty much a given for any browser-based chat product. But I suppose with Rustaceans that might not be the case, since in theory you could create your own socket protocol and communicate over a Wasm client… :)
I stumbled across this today. Looks like its been in development for about 9 months now. I have an account on the beta server and hope to set up my own soon. Surprisingly slick.
This might be the discord-like self hosted solution matrix just isn’t.
Looks promising!
This would be a no-brainer switch if there was a native client application. Still awesome though.
It does have an interesting crate choice. Different solutions for websockets and REST API, using async-std but then reqwest too, which uses tokio underneath ?
The developer documentation is pretty spartan at the moment. On that front, this project doesn’t feel that impressive.
Seeing that name, I fully expected a new Rust take on https://rvgl.re-volt.io , the OpenGL port of Re-Volt. Anyhow, it’s always great to see someone tackle big communication providers in a FOSS flavor.
More discord than matrix currently. But matrix has a discordification meta-issue: https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/7487