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
    11·
    16 days 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
      9·
      16 days 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.

        • ayyo@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          16 days ago

          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.

        • Jayjader@jlai.luEnglish
          1·
          15 days 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
        0·
        16 days ago

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

        • Alfredolin@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
          0·
          16 days 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
            0·
            16 days 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
              0·
              16 days 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
                1·
                16 days 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
    5·
    16 days 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·
      15 days 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
          1·
          14 days 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

        • magz :3@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          1·
          13 days ago

          i think for my purposes i’m fine with hosting that through a separate service, so instead of XMPP + mumble i would run polyproto + mumble (or some other voip solution, screen sharing seems to be a decent way away in mumble)

          but (as i understand it), polyproto isn’t a chat protocol per se, but more a protocol for federated message authentication. as an application of this protocol, they’re building polyproto-chat, which is a chat protocol. in theory, one could then also build a polyproto-voice so you can use the same account for both chatting and voice calls. i still think this is pretty far away, considering how young polyproto is, which is why my current vision is chat and voice as two separate services (which i also prefer because i imagine it makes the technology simpler and hosting easier)

    • fixmycode@feddit.clEnglish
      0·
      15 days ago

      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

      • renegadespork@lemmy.jelliefrontier.netEnglish
        1·
        15 days ago

        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.

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
    1·
    16 days 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).