Yeah, it has. Not as quickly as one would like, but we're all working on it with the time we have available.
A few assorted features have already rolled out, but the main focus has been on the new clients. A native Android app just got released in early access, there is a native iOS app on TestFlight in heavy development, and there is a new web front-end in beta.
The ecosystem has also matured a lot, and much of our behind the scenes tooling and processes have improved. You can have a look at the blog on the website to see more.
You could ask the same about Discord (and you'd get the answer "it's getting worse")
Revolt is extremely well done, and yes this IPO means folks will flock to it when Discord dials up the revenue streams. It's an easy prediction because it's always how things goes...
What social media platform has people flocking to open source platforms when it goes public? The most successful one I can think of is Bluesky, and it’s still small enough that I wouldn’t call it flocking
That also wasn’t prompted by Twitter going public, it was prompted by Twitter going _private_. And Twitter’s self-immolation is… unusual in its scale and ambition.
I guess it depends on your threshold for "flocking". Certainly there are still a ton of people (and bots) left on Twitter (for example), but people did leave and go to Bluesky and Mastodon.
And if the place people go to is a smaller player with comparatively not that many users, that influx can present scaling problems for them, even if it's a drop in the bucket for the platform they came from.
Bluesky also has the dubious distinction of starting at Twitter, having been founded by the Twitter founder, splitting off when the mothership got acquired.
The only thing I genuinely care about is some kind of a "raise hand" button in VoIP to indicate you have something to say while someone is talking. (emotes don't show user name if you are doing screenshare, and they disappear after a second anyway.) I've been switching between discord and Teams for work chats for years now, and it's literally the only thing I find superior in Teams.
I can't imagine what Discords reasoning is, but it continues to surprise me to see raise hand missing in every single increasingly annoying update. Just give me a stupid little yellow hand! Have it show my username! Keep it on the screen until I turn it off! That's all I need! I don't care about the shop! I don't want nitro! I don't care about party games or holiday integration or anything else.
Enshittification is a given. Once bankers take over, users become lusers that serve to stuff their pockets. This was always going to happen to discord.
Slack, discord, teams, zoom, hipchat (if you remember that one) etc. all kind of overlap in functionality. They are all commercial tools with slightly different takes on the same space: team communication. Google's internally paranoid schizophrenic mix of ever flopping chat solutions also have some adjacent products. Meets doesn't do chat and chat doesn't do video.
What do all of these have in common: they are running backwards and are ever fiddling with ways to ask money for their centralized services. Slack is now owned by salesforce. Zoom peaked during the pandemic but turned out to be a one trick pony. Teams is causing MS to retire Skype and is universally hated for its bloat, poor performance, and pervasiveness in dreadful enterprise heavy companies. And discord does essentially the same things but for gamers.
I'm not familiar with revolt. But this stuff is obviously a commodity given the many contenders in this crowded market. So, free and open source should be good enough. There's a long history of chat solutions peaking and then sliding away into obscurity. ICQ, Yahoo messenger, MSN, AOL, etc. The bazillion Google chat/communication products that flopped hard. All gone. All predecessors to Slack and modern equivalents. I was chatting with colleagues in the late nineties using ICQ. These days I use Slack. And Whatsapp. And Meets. And Teams (because our customers are really into masochistic Microsoft products). And all the rest.
Revolt is only partially open source unfortunately. IMHO this is a mistake. It's yet another walled garden. It's 2025; we still don't have a proper federated solution (like email) that doesn't lock you in to 1 company, 1 UI, 1 network, etc. The reason email is still around is that federation is important. Everything else comes, enshittifies, and then goes away. Email stays. Why do I need different apps to chat/video call to different people? I have about half a dozen on my phone currently. It's ridiculous.
We use discord as a workplace chat platform that has allowed us to make great use of its converged “internal + external” structure. Basically, its works as both a team commons as well as a customer support and customer champion platform.
With everything it has provided for us there, I’m somewhere between shocked and flippant that discord hasn’t served our user category well or really at all. For example i’d love to have better tools to track customer support, measure user sentiment, promote the product to discord users, tie our premium features to discord statuses without using random bots and third parties, and so forth. And none of this needs to come at the expense of its free and open nature.
I still love discord, and I buy nitro for myself simply because we get so much value from the product that buying nitro for myself was “the least I could do”. But still. Huge missed opportunity.
Yes! We, too, happily used Discord for years in our small company - it was absolutely amazing and I also wonder why they don't have a version for companies - in my mind it easily beats Teams in nearly any factor that's important to us - though admittedly we're not a typical Microsoft-using enterprise.
I agree. I use discord a lot, mostly in personal servers and community servers. It has a lot going for it in terms of easy to use, useful features, all integrated together. I feel like discord could easily fill a niche for small to medium businesses as an all-in-one communication platform for internal and external use if they focused their efforts on it.
I think that's what the commenter is confused about. I am too. Discord is more usable than Slack in a lot of ways so their pure focus on gamers who are notoriously price sensitive and won't pay for a messaging platform instead of trying to court businesses is strange. It's especially confusing when they go through extreme measures to make money from gamers when there's a cash cow in B2B sales.
I know a lot of large organizations who use discord in spite of this simply because it's better than Slack for their scale.
If you'd like to delete your Discord messages en masse, I made an open-source tool for that [1]. It leverages a fairly undocumented process using your Discord data package, providing a UI to explore it and choose what to export. The tool gives you step-by-step instructions and a CSV file that Discord expects when you contact their privacy team. It works across all channels in both servers and DMs, even those you no longer have access to.
Shareholders optimize for money, users don't like themselves and the things they use to be optimized for money. They rather have good service. Since the perfect product earns you max money with min features, these two priorities are opposed.
I get what you're saying, but I’m not sure it’s fully true. If it were true, then all public companies would be bad (using bad in a loose sense here). I think Apple, for example, has a good balance between optimizing money and product.
Well, maybe only in the sense that you still seem to be willing to buy. But the amount of people willing to pay the apple tax seems to be shrinking lately, considering recent reports of low sw quality and let's also throw in the 4-digit monitor stand stunt.
Since you put three evers - Amazon went public on May 15, 1997. If you can say it hasn’t improved since 1997, with a straight face, I’d be convinced you’re a few bats shy of a belfry.
Amazon wasn’t a service. It was a retailer. And I can’t 100.0% guarantee that I won’t get a counterfeit if I order today, so I don’t consider that an improvement, overall.
Once shareholders are involved it's no longer enough for the company to make enough profit to sustain itself, it now needs to make more profit each year.
There might be a period of growth in the beginning when investment leads to development of new features and refining the platform, and more users join. But eventually it hits a point of maximum market saturation. The product is as feature rich as it can be, the user numbers have reached their limit.
It's at that point that enshittification begins. More ads, the minimum amount of money spent to maintain the system, locking features behind premium subscriptions, prices go up. Just look at youtube, netflix etc. At this point youtube in particular has become unusable, and the content is nothing like the stuff you used to watch on there, it's all long video essays full of sponsors as that's what the company promotes and encourages, but not what people really want to see.
Shareholders are the prime driver behind enshittification of platforms. Because they hold earnings calls every quarter and make the team extract more and more rents from their ecosystem, to make number go up.
But hey, the shareholder game already started when VCs bought in. I support every company developing a way for utility tokenholders to buy out shareholders. That way we fairly buy out the parasitic shareholder class so we eliminate the main incentives for enshittification!
Shareholders expect constant growth which will lead to reality-disconnected PMs forcing dumb feature after dumb feature down the users throat until the very codebase of discord will rot and bloat.
Having a good revenue stream is also a pre-req for staying private long term.
I think the fear here is that a public company is going to optimize heavily for profits to the detriment of the service itself, which public tech companies seem to often do (not that private companies don't do this, it just doesn't seem like they generally do it as consistently and to the same extent as public companies). Subjectively I've found acquisitions or IPOs are often a bad sign for product quality.
Exactly this. If a company isn't bringing in enough money to support their service, they are going to look to other sources. Those sources aren't just free money though, but the company can take that influx of cash and spend it on implementing things that do make money. And these money-making strategies have to be far more aggressive because not only does the company now need to make enough to keep everything running and their employees paid, but it also needs to make extra on top of that so that investors can see a return.
> I think the fear here is that a public company is going to optimize heavily for profits to the detriment of the service itself, which public tech companies seem to often do
I think that is largely because we remember the ones that do and not the ones that don't.
As an example, companies like microsoft & amazon, while ruthless, don't really fit that mold.
I always find it interesting when Discord is always called a gaming chat platform (or sometimes video chat), when all but 3 servers, which I rarely use, are not about gaming, and only one ever uses video chat (our TTRPG group). Makes me wonder how vastly different the average Discord experience is from mine.
And as a tangent: I really wonder what I did to FT to get "Sorry, you have been blocked" for quite some time now.
Discord is an IdP and a hosting provider for voice/video/stream sharing.
Jitsi meet and mumble can do some of the services, but not for free and not as an IdP.
Also discord isn't encrypted E2E so I have to be honest, with AI analysis being what it will be soon, talking politics is honestly scary. No way the feds don't have hooks into it by now, esp. after that air force guy leaked secret data.
As a somewhat casual discord user, what am I missing out on by not using Nitro? The only feature that's in my face is all the emojis I can't use but I also don't really use emojis that much to begin with.
I have to say that their monetisation so far has been excellent, at least from my point of view.
I don't believe they have paywalled any core features, only paywalled a few new features that are cosmetic only. If you don't pay for Discord Nitro or anything, you can still chat, call, join and use servers. The biggest advantage of Nitro is actually shared with everyone on your favorite server, and by 'boosting' the server you give features to everyone on it. I like that.
Is there any way that they could have monetised it better? I see it as pretty creative and user-friendly, given there's not many avenues to monetise a free service such as a chat.
Did you know Discord has a "store" that sells games?
I didn't, until my Discord account was compromised and the attacker was able to make $35 in purchases in the <60s it took me to realize it had happened and revoke all login sessions.
I'd say that's getting worse. Why does a communications app have a store at all? Why is it set up to pull from the credit card I use for Nitro without additional confirmation?
I'm a casual user (I feel like "casual" overstates it, even), and I don't think I've noticed much either. But I think that's the point; most casual users of something will miss a lot of the changes, both good and bad, that come down.
Honestly besides the poor UI changes on mobile, my main complaint is the constant seasonal animations on buttons that try to get you to click the gift button especially and buy nitro for yourself or friends.
Most of the more annoying added features like TTS, Super-Reactions, and other animated non-sense can at least be moderated in server settings/ user accessibility settings.
The hostility to third party applications is a little annoying but I've only used those on edge cases (Armcord for WinARM laptops, Discord-Lite for PPC Macs)
[1]: https://revolt.chat