Revolt: The Open-Source Discord Alternative and How to Take It To The Next Level

Discord has become the go-to platform for communities, from gaming clans and hobby groups to study circles and even professional teams. It offers text, voice, video, and an ecosystem of servers that cover every interest imaginable. In this context, Revolt emerged as a promising open-source alternative to Discord, aiming to address concerns like privacy, data ownership, and customization. I took a closer look at Revolt, diving into its growth, community discussions, and my own experience, and I have to admit: while people love the idea of Revolt, its journey so far shows it hasn’t found that “hockey stick” growth or killer feature to truly rival Discord. Below, I’ll break down what Revolt is doing, what challenges it faces, and some thoughts on how to make it better.

Revolt’s Growth: Slow and Steady

Revolt launched in early 2021 as a FOSS (Free and Open-Source Software) chat platform very similar in concept to Discord. Unlike Discord’s closed-source model, Revolt’s code is open and even self-hostable, appealing to those who value transparency and control. However, when it comes to user growth, Revolt’s trajectory has been modest. It took until mid-2023 for Revolt to hit 100,000 registered users, despite having been in public beta since August 2021. That’s a solid milestone, but nothing like Discord’s explosive early growth.

To Revolt’s credit, it did see an uptick in users in the fall of 2024, hitting the 500k mark around October of that year. Notably, that timing coincided with some geopolitical shake-ups: Discord was suddenly banned in Russia and Turkey in early October 2024. Those bans left many communities cut off from Discord overnight. Likely, some of those displaced users (especially privacy-conscious or tech-savvy ones) flocked to alternatives like Revolt, contributing to the “quite the user influx” that Revolt’s team reported around that time. In other words, external events gave Revolt a bump – but even so, half a million users is a drop in the bucket next to Discord’s empire. There’s no sign yet of the hockey-stick growth curve that would signal Revolt truly breaking into the mainstream. For now it’s more of a slow burn, growing gradually and occasionally spiking when Discord stumbles or gets blocked somewhere.

How Much Do Users Care About Privacy and Open Source?

A core selling point of Revolt is that it’s privacy-friendly and open-source. In theory, that sounds great – no proprietary code, the ability to self-host your server, and presumably no corporate data mining. The question is: Do everyday users care enough about those factors to leave Discord’s comfort?

In my opinion, not many do, at least not enough to endure much inconvenience. It’s a harsh truth that we see repeatedly in tech: lots of people say privacy matters, but when push comes to shove, they often stick with what their friends are using, even if it’s a more closed platform. Revolt doesn’t (yet) offer end-to-end encryption or federation, likely because the typical Discord-style audience hasn’t been clamoring for it – most gamers and community members prioritize ease of use over hardcore privacy features. An open-source ethos alone isn’t a killer feature for the masses if the experience isn’t markedly better than the status quo.

To switch en masse, users would need to feel some pain on Discord or see some huge gain on Revolt. Discord, for all its flaws, works pretty well for most people. Yes, there are privacy concerns (Discord is proprietary, messages aren’t E2E encrypted, etc.), but for the average user hanging out in a fan community or playing Valorant with friends, those concerns are abstract.

The inconvenience of convincing all your friends to move to a new platform outweighs the abstract benefit of “FOSS goodness” for most people. I’m a big fan of open-source philosophy, but I recognize I’m in a niche. Revolt’s challenge is that its most marketable strengths – privacy, open code, self-hosting – are niche priorities. They matter a lot to a small subset of users (like open-source enthusiasts, developers, or communities that have specific reasons to distrust big platforms), but they aren’t enough by themselves to trigger a mass migration from Discord.

The Network Effect: You Can’t Chat Alone

One huge hurdle for Revolt (and any would-be Discord rival) is the network effect. The value of a chat platform grows exponentially with the number of people on it. Discord’s success is mainly because everyone is already on Discord. There are servers for every topic, and communities cross-link and intermingle. As one commenter aptly put it, Discord’s biggest selling point is “its insane network effects” – every niche community from AI/ML to gaming to art has a presence there, and tons of adjacent communities interconnect. In plainer terms: all your friends (and favorite content creators, and study group, etc.) are on Discord, so you stay on Discord. It’s hard to pull people away from that without a very compelling reason.

Revolt is positioning itself as a Discord alternative, which sets a high bar: users expect it to match Discord in everything (more on features in a moment), plus ideally solve some of Discord’s shortcomings. But even if Revolt was a 1:1 clone feature-wise (which it isn’t, yet), you’d still be facing the blank-room problem. A chat platform with no people is just a pretty UI. To get the same value from Revolt, you’d need to recreate your social graph or community there. If I moved my small friend group to Revolt, I’d need enough of them active to keep conversation flowing – I’d say at least half a dozen folks chatting daily. And for a larger community, you might need on the order of 50+ members to migrate over just to not feel like a ghost town. That’s a huge ask. Essentially, you have to uproot an entire social circle or community and collectively relocate. This is why even superior platforms often struggle to unseat incumbents: the inertia of where your social ties live is massive.

In practice, I’ve seen Revolt mostly attract smaller niche groups or highly motivated users (like those frustrated with Discord’s policies or bans). For example, when Discord got banned in Turkey and Russia, some communities likely experimented with Revolt – but many others probably just waited it out or used VPNs to stay on Discord. It takes a lot for people to abandon their network. Unless Discord alienates its base (say, through heavy-handed moderation, paywalls, or catastrophic breaches), Revolt will need more than philosophical purity to break the network effect lock-in.

All social network eventually develops an unfair competitive advantage because of their scale. However, when you compare Discord vs Reddit, you will realize that Reddit is far harder to replace because a user goes to Reddit to view a vast majority of new content created by millions of others. On Discord, an excellent user session typically involves the user interacting with at most seven people simultaneously for a short period. This is due to the nature of private communities and Discord's lack of discoverability.

Feature Parity and the Expectation Game

Because Revolt bills itself as a Discord alternative, users naturally compare the two on features. And let’s be real: Discord has set a high bar after years of development and billions in funding. People switching to Revolt will expect all the creature comforts they’re used to on Discord, and if anything significant is missing or rough around the edges, it’s a strike against Revolt.

One of Discord’s key features (especially in its early growth among gamers) is high-quality voice chat and streaming. This was arguably Discord’s “killer app” at the start – it did voice comms really well, with low latency and good clarity, outshining older tools like TeamSpeak or Skype. Over time,, Discord also added smooth screen-sharing and video calls. Revolt, on the other hand, is still catching up on this front. Yes, Revolt implemented voice chat, but by their own admission it’s not fully where it needs to be. In fact, the ,development of voice features hit a snag: a few years ago the team embarked on a major backend rewrite, and during that period, voice chat received 0 improvements for about three years. As a result, Revolt’s voice functionality today is basic and not nearly as battle-tested as Discord’s. Video calls and screen-sharing? Those are not available yet – screen sharing is on the roadmap, but not implemented as of the latest update. For communities that rely on hanging out in voice channels, streaming games or holding video meetings, this is a significant limitation. It’s hard to convince a Discord server full of avid voice-chat users to migrate to Revolt when they’d be giving up the seamless voice experience they’re accustomed to.

Beyond voice/video, there are lots of little (but important) features Discord users take for granted. Mobile app quality is a big one. Discord has polished native mobile apps on iOS and Android. Revolt, being a smaller project, initially offered a web-app experience on mobile, which was clunky. The Revolt team heard the complaints – “you’re all tired of using the web app on mobile” – and has been developing new native Android and iOS apps from scratch. Good news: those mobile apps are in beta now, and early screenshots show a familiar, sleek interface. Bad news: it took time to get here, and in the interim many users who tried Revolt on their phone might have been underwhelmed. Mobile is often how communities stay engaged on the go, so this was a critical gap that Revolt is only now starting to fill.

Revolt’s upcoming mobile apps aim to close the gap with Discord’s polished mobile experience. Early testers can join the beta programs via Google Play and TestFlight to try these apps out. However, building fully native apps from scratch is a long road – it shows Revolt’s commitment to matching Discord’s convenience, but also highlights how much catching up is needed.

Even on desktop, Revolt has had to play catch-up on features like pinned messages (which Discord has had for ages). Revolt only introduced pinned messages in late 2024, noting that users had been resorting to bot hacks or search functions as a workaround until then. It’s a small feature, yes, but these small quality-of-life features add up in daily use. Discord’s years of iteration mean it has a lot of these niceties baked in – thread support, integrations, robust search, roles/permissions, moderation tools, you name it. Revolt is steadily adding missing pieces (they also added webhooks integration recently, catching up to Discord on that developer-friendly feature), but it’s a never-ending game of feature parity. When people consider switching, any missing feature can be a deal-breaker if it’s something their community relies on.

There’s also the matter of performance and reliability. Discord, for all the complaints we might have about it, is pretty stable at scale. Revolt is still ironing out kinks to handle growth. For example, the rush of new users in 2024 caused some lag and downtime issues, forcing the team to scramble to scale infrastructure. They even overhauled their backend (replacing the message broker and fixing bugs) to improve stability under load. It’s normal for a young platform to go through growing pains, but users coming from Discord will compare uptime and snappiness. If Revolt feels slow or goes down often when more people join, that’s a problem – people have little patience for outages when they’re used to Discord “just working” (and even Discord’s occasional outages cause big stir).

A fruit for thought is that rather than trying to position oneself as an alternative to Discord, try to be something Discord is not. Focus on one killer feature and one specific niche at a time. When your users are not mentally comparing you against Discord, it's a lot easier to ask for forgiveness.

Customization and Self-Hosting: Nice but Not Enough

One area where Revolt tries to differentiate is customization. Because it’s open source, users can theoretically tweak the client or even host their own servers with custom rules and mods. Revolt’s official instance allows custom CSS themes, bots (there’s an emerging ecosystem of Revolt bots and libraries), and other personalization that will appeal to power users who love to tinker. The platform’s look and feel is also very familiar to Discord users, with a clean dark theme and similar layout – which is good (low learning curve) but also means it doesn’t visually stand out much from Discord.

For the average user, though, looks do matter in the sense that any new platform must feel as nice as what they’re used to. Revolt can’t afford to be uglier or clunkier than Discord if it hopes to lure people. From my testing, Revolt’s UI is actually quite slick and not too far off from Discord’s design language – which is intentional, I’m sure, to make Discord transplants feel at home. The ability to apply custom themes is cool for enthusiasts, but I doubt it’s a big draw for the mainstream (after all, even Discord allows some level of theme variation with light/dark and custom background images for profiles, and third-party mods like BetterDiscord exist, albeit unofficially). While I love that Revolt is highly customizable (and I can run my own server with my own rules), I recognize that this is a niche priority. Most people just want a place their friends are, that looks reasonably nice by default. Revolt’s default look is fine; it’s not a reason people flock to it, but at least it’s not a reason they’d avoid it either.

Self-hosting, similarly, is a double-edged sword. Revolt lets you self-host your own instance, which is awesome for communities that want to be completely independent or have special use-cases (imagine a company running an in-house Revolt server for internal comms, or a group of friends building their own walled garden). However, self-hosting is very niche in practice. It requires technical know-how and the willingness to maintain a server. And crucially, if your goal is to have a wide community, self-hosting doesn’t solve the network effect problem – you can run your own server yet another platform won’t seamlessly interact with the main Revolt community or other servers (since Revolt is not federated like Matrix). In other words, I could go through the trouble of setting up a Revolt server for my podcast community, but then I would also have to convince all my listeners to not only leave Discord but also join my server, and only my server. That’s a hard sell, unless my community is extremely devoted and privacy-conscious. Most communities would rather be where the people already are (Discord) than strike off on their own isolated island. So while I applaud Revolt for offering self-hosting (it’s one of those ideological pluses), I don’t see it driving mass adoption. It’s a feature that appeals to a dedicated few rather than the millions of Discord users out there.

Why Switch If It’s Not Significantly Better?

At the end of the day, Revolt is trying to compete by being as good as Discord, but open source and user-first. The harsh reality of competition in social platforms is that being “as good as” isn’t enough. People will endure the status quo unless a new option is significantly better in some key dimension. We’ve touched on this, but let’s underscore it: Discord itself didn’t win people over by being identical to prior platforms – it won by being better. Early on, it was better voice chat and a more seamless user experience that let Discord dethrone older tools. One commenter on Hacker News recounted how Discord’s free, easy-to-use model (one link invite, no setup fuss) allowed it to spread like wildfire in gaming groups, whereas older solutions like TeamSpeak had lots of friction (installs, server costs, etc.). Discord also benefitted from generous free features (no slot limits on servers, no need to pay for basic functionality like one had to with some VoIP servers) and a polished UI that “put much of the competition to shame” in voice/audio quality. By doing one thing great (voice) and everything else well enough, Discord reached a critical mass and then became an all-in-one platform people didn’t want to leave.

So far, Revolt hasn’t demonstrated a killer feature or experience that’s markedly better than Discord to the average user. Yes, it has no ads, no tracking, more transparency – those are admirable but subtle advantages. If tomorrow Discord made a huge misstep (like drastic privacy invasion or steep paywalls for basic use), Revolt could capitalize, but that’s more about Discord faltering than Revolt innovating. Right now, Revolt feels more like “Discord, but open source!” rather than “Discord, but way better at X!” – and as we’ve discussed, matching Discord on every front is a massive undertaking in itself.

From a regular server owner or community manager’s perspective, switching to Revolt is risky. You’d be trading a known, stable platform (where all your members already are) for a newer platform that might not yet have all the features you rely on, and where you may struggle to onboard people. Even if you value the ideals behind Revolt, you have to consider your community: will they follow you? Will they be as active on Revolt, or will it kill the group’s momentum? These are non-trivial concerns. For most, the answer is “let’s stay where we are for now.”

Wild Thoughts: How to Do This Differently

1. Stop branding yourself as a Discord alternative. The bar is just too high. Discord, despite its flaws, is an excellent product that offers a comprehensive suite of outstanding features for a wide range of users at no cost.
2. Don't try to serve everyone. The biggest complaint about Revolt is the lack of proper video streaming. As you can imagine, people who need the function the most are probably gamers, who are served by a variety of different platforms, such as Guilded. Revolt should make a stand on whether they are serving everyone, the gamers, or someone else.
3. Don't try to build for everyone. Pick a group that you want to serve first. Although there is nothing wrong with serving gamers, it is probably the most competitive segment, and users likely have the highest expectations. Pick one feature that gamers want; it's perhaps not streaming, since they can get it for free on Discord now, and then build to the best at that particular feature.

Early Days and a Long Road Ahead

In conclusion, Revolt is an exciting project – it represents a pushback against the idea that we’re all stuck with whatever the tech giants hand us. I love that an open-source, privacy-centric alternative to Discord exists. The team and community around Revolt have built something impressive given their size and resources, and they’ve hit milestones like 100k and 500k users that show there is some appetite out there for change. People who use Revolt often dospeak highly of it, enjoying the freedom and the more community-driven vibe.

However, my honest take (with a bit of analytic cynicism) is that Revolt’s current trajectory is an uphill battle. It’s growing, but not fast enough in the grand scheme, and it has not yet experienced the kind of breakout moment that could propel it into mainstream awareness. The episodes where Discord was banned in certain countries gave Revolt a brief boost, but those were more like serendipitous stress tests than a sustainable growth strategy. They exposed Revolt to new users, but didn’t magically make it a household name or a must-have platform.

For Revolt to truly thrive, it likely needs one of two things (or maybe both): 1) a significant leap in what it offers (some feature or experience that is so much better than Discord that even people who don’t care about open-source would consider switching), or 2) a major shift in user sentiment that makes Discord users actively seek alternatives (for example, if Discord really “enshittifies” itself, to borrow a popular term for platforms going bad). Right now, Revolt is almost as good as Discord in many areas, and even improving in the areas it lags (e.g. mobile apps, voice chat quality). But “almost as good” plus “open-source” is not a compelling pitch for the masses yet.

As a Discord server owner or community manager, I’ll keep an eye on Revolt. It’s the kind of thing I want to succeed in, because competition and user-centric design are healthy for all of us. Maybe Revolt will keep steadily improving and slowly building its user base, and perhaps a year or two down the line it will hit a point where migrating doesn’t feel like a sacrifice at all. Revolt is in its early days, and it’s going to take more than philosophy and parity to really spark a revolution in chat.