Many of the online stores I shop at have offers like “leave a review and you’ll get a coupon for your next purchase”, so they get a lot of pointless reviews like “It arrived. Didn’t try the product yet. 5 stars”

I find that there’s a very strong correlation between the average age of the customer base and the uselessness of the reviews.

This project has a lot of red flags for long-term sustainability. It needs to be forked and maintained by someone who cares about open-source and decentralization, not being a Discord competitor.

• The developers have no plans for financing the platform. In the FAQs, they claim that they managed to raise $2000 in donations, and that covers the costs for now, so they’ll think about financing “later”.
• For whatever reason, they chose to develop not just the messaging client but the messaging protocol, voice, file and media servers. That creates a lot of work for the small team to maintain.
• They don’t want to implement federation, partially because they would have to rewrite their entire backend, but also because…
• They want to force people to use the revolt.chat instance. While Revolt can be self-hosted, the documentation actively discourages this and tries to obfuscate the self-hosting process as much as possible.
• The open-source code is also several versions behind revolt.chat so that revolt.chat can keep an advantage over self-hosted instances.
• The developers are university students who have never developed software professionally or managed a social media platform before.
• Combine all of this with the lack of financing plans and you will have a service that is bound to implode or become enshittified when the operating costs and platform administration become too taxing.

Revolt is a very impressive full-stack project for the developers’ experience level, but it’s not a good FLOSS Discord alternative.

On another note, why are there so many children in the article’s comment section? Is that really the quality of the average Revolt user?

Sorry, I don’t get this argument. Is not being able to avoid corporations justified because people are forced to use email? Social media is also becoming a lot less optional these days. I know a lot of small businesses that only share location and contact information on Facebook or Instagram, because they don’t want to invest in building their own website.

I also hate this concept that there is a hierarchy of users in the Fediverse, the “core users” and I suppose, the “idiots who migrated over from a bigger social media site”. Look how well Lemmy performed from 2019 to mid-2023 with only “core users”, it was a graveyard. As long as a real person has an account on the Fediverse that they actively use, they are a Fediverse user, and they must be considered when discussing the Fediverse in general.

There will always be instances that do not federate with corporate instances, just like how you can set up an email server that blocks Gmail and Outlook. But I don’t want to see a Fediverse where these instances are dead and marginalized because corporate instances consumed most of the Fediverse.

This “anyone is free to join any instance, you can just avoid what you don’t like” kind of thinking is perfectly reasonable in theory, but I think what OP wants to know is if this also holds up in practice. You could “defederate” Google and Microsoft by blocking emails from Gmail and Outlook addresses, but the reality is that the majority of people you will need to contact use those addresses. In most cases, your school/workplace will even make you use them for your organizational email. Yes, it is possible to avoid these companies and choose alternatives, but you’ll be isolating yourself from the majority of the network.

The question is not if it will be possible to use the future corporate-owned Fediverse without Meta (of course it will), but if it will be feasible for the majority of users.