It's in their FAQ[0] as well. But seems to boil down to because they wanted it. And there's nothing wrong with that.

[0]: https://developers.revolt.chat/faq/why_new

That is some of the weakest reasoning I've ever read, but... I guess I can't stop them.

Well… the developers are self described students of the ages of 17 to 19.

Making a project just to learn is par per course. Chat… especially non federated chat isn’t really that hard to implement as a protocol. It’s the UX that’s hard to nail down, and if they can get it right it won’t matter if Matrix existed first.

This is actually a pretty strong reason. If your target is to build an app like this, getting distracted by a completely different technology which might or might not be more usable for some subproblem is the easiest way to loose interest. And without interest, the open source project is dead in the water.

It doesn't need to be a success for them to learn from the experience.

There's not much (any ?) open-source self-hostable good slack/discord-like apps. Open source projects usually focus on federation and/or encryption when Revolt focus on UI/UX. If you're looking for a free software that just works, with good UI and you don't care for encryption, that might just be the best option out there. I'm not sure you can find anything more convincing.

There is Mattermost which is very good self hosted alternative to slack. Big players like CERN are using it.

Mattermost and rocket.chat don't do voice themselves. Discord does, in the client (no jitsi, etc) Matrix with coturn also does localized voip (i.e. confined to the homeserver) if configured correctly.

When I hear discord I generally think of voice/video chat and screen sharing, and less about text chat; this may be a side effect of all the bridges, though, as I tend to chat on IRC and all three of my primary discord channels are bridged.

I run matrix, mattermost, and rocket.chat. I like the api/whatever of mattermost but I really like the overall feel of matrix the best.

I was saying that mattermost is reliable alternative to slack. I wasn't talking about Discord.

I mean, there's matrix. Just because you can federate, doesn't mean you have to. You can run it in isolation (in fact, it's even easier). Additionally, you don't have to care about or enable encryption either.

Matrix also has nothing to do with UI or UX. The clients do. Write a new client if all you care about is UI/UX. You have a much higher chance of success.

There is Mumble and Teamspeak. Voice-wise they are equal or better. But not in text (Mumble severely lacking, Teamspeak marginally better).

> Voice-wise they are equal or better

Mumble/Murmur and Teamspeak have better voice functionality than Discord, because they really are designed for voice chatting.

> But not in text (Mumble severely lacking, Teamspeak marginally better).

Concur, and this, along with all-in-one Slack-like rich URL handling leads to selections of discord.

A more OSS friendly stack of Pidgin + Daemon | IRC & Mumble/Murmur seems to have the best scaling, and the best of both worlds, at least in my opinion because it has the lowest cost, richest functionality, and can scale the highest in terms of users without being dependent on a commercial service. I say this because I have seen Mumble/Murmur with > 2000 active users which is possible due to the rich permissioning system and excellent performance.

> As if the world needs yet another slack-like.

You mean another IRC-like? :)

You know, I was tempted to write that to begin like as I'm a fan of irc over slack for non-work chat, but for the same reason I prefer slack for work - it's sufficiently different.

As much as we can all agree that IRC-likes, and even IRC's predecessors are wonderful and responsible for much of the progress we have today, I think we can also fairly say not every chat application from now unto forever is an IRC-like.

I would (and I think fairly) catagorise a set of slack-likes and IRC-likes differently, with matrix occupying a grey area inbetween.

Contributing is hard. U have to follow 3rd party rules.

Unless they plan for their repo to have zero contrib policy and open merge rights, they will also have to follow rules and force people to follow their (third party) rules.

Sometimes it's worthwhile to consider that the "third party rules" you don't want to abide, are there for good reason.

Furthermore, sometimes the underlying reason for those rules is something you can hack on and open up.

"Oh we won't ever support feature X because of legacy arch Y so no PRs for feature X please". Well, perhaps you can solve legacy arch Y and help everyone at a more fundamental level.

However, open source is almost 100% about "selfish" things like exploration, passion, relaxing etc. as shown by the number of projects that have exactly 1 maintainer (almost all of them). Linux and friends are exceptions and majority of devs working on those are payed by big corps and that is their regular job.