Revolt: A New Review 2022!
WHATS NEW?
The website has got a new look no longer saying in the slogan how privacy is critical but you can be sure that your conversations are confidential and your data is secure. This should give people a more welcome feel in trusting them with your data. End to end encryption has still not been developed yet but new features has arrived to Revolt.
Revolt can now have CSS gradient color roles which at the current moment can be done through the api and a bash terminal. Reactions has been added so you may react with custom emojis you uploaded to the emoji picker on your server. Categories has been added so now you may make categories and put your channels in them.
Voice chat is currently being rebuilt from the ground up with a new structure to bring a working voice chat to revolt. Its good to see some small progress being made since 2021 that's all the new pretty much.
The Gritty!
It's time to get into the experience now this is the critical points based on observation, witnessing events & my own interactions which is the experience I received dealing with the staff. Company or internet group no matter what you are as an entity when you run a service you are viewed and experienced as a service. Its important to understand that every person you interact with is important if you want your new product to maintain a good reputation and have the buzz fluttering.
As far as we know Revolt is no registered company or LLC so if you are expecting a certain level of professionalism that goes as standard practice with any business you may be in for a rude awakening. There is development going on but it is slow as the main staff is really a sum of 3 people. One who is rarely communicative with the community but focuses on multiple projects including working on revolt. Another staff member who is the most active developer on Revolt but spends more time socializing and playing video games such as Beat Saber, Minecraft, Fortnite Battle Royale, Among us, & Valorant. The third staff member is the site designer who only built the site and focuses more on their own personal blog.
The rest are contributions made from online community members which big contributors get the Revolt developer badge. So there is confusion between major contributors and staff members when looking at someones profile because they both have the developer badge but staff members will have the platform moderator badge I think this is a bad look it shows a compromise of security.
Don't Expect Support You Won't Get It!
If you need support with revolt and must email contact@revolt.chat you will be waiting a long time for a response if your lucky to even get one. I had to contact support because I was reporting a bot for potentially breaking the privacy policy. The bot in question was made by someone who is a online member then was given the dev badge for becoming a major contributor to the github. The bot has many utility features but the one feature that alarmed me was the fact that this bot backs up an entire server's chat messages an archives it with option to even restore the messages on a new server!
There is no privacy policy for the bot and you have no idea what is being done with this information. I had sent my email on Sept 3rd, 2022 and have not received a response.
But the owner of the bot called me out in an off-topic channel asking me to contact him for questions. When I responded with a question mark he mentioned about my email I had sent to support which brought me to this post. This is very highly unprofessional not receiving a response then unknowingly find out that the staff of Revolt just shares your email data with bot owners.
There are some things to keep in mind when you take a look at Revolt as these are the facts.
• They are not a legal entity such as a company, LLC, or even trademarked.
• The developers are teenagers
• There is no guidelines or structures for bots anyone can add their bot to revolt and launch it performing any malicious intent that they want to do.
• Revolt does not have an open transparency
Privacy is very important and a major concern in today's day & age. People are concerned their data will be shared or sold without consent and everyone's looking for the next privacy focused thing/ With that we are all hoping the next thing we come across is true to its word and we always give a benefit of a doubt. Its important to know and to exploit those that may not consider your privacy and use bad ethics to take advantage of others.
My email should never have been shown to the bot owner this is suppose to be confidential. What should have happened is I should have gotten a response from the staff with an explanation of how this bot is allowed to be on when it creates transcripts of chat in a entire server & backs it up for the owner & bot user who is managing the bot in their own server to read & restore the archived chat.
Revolt may not sell your data but they do give it away freely. There is no guidelines for adding a bot which anyone can add a bot and do something malicious with it to obtain information and control servers. I'm not sure about you but this puts the bad taste in my experience knowing that what I say in a confidential support is easily given away because of the staff.
The slow development is not just because there is only really 2 people who work on Revolt. They spend more time playing video games and arguing politics when it comes to LGBT agenda with people on Revolt who they end up just permanent banning anyone who has any form of op-positional view from their own. The second major reason is the lack of a good documentation for self-hosted instance on top of the self hosting instance not being the same product version as the stable build.
This means that some of the features on the current build are not implemented or in a broken state on the self hosted instance build. I see this as a major flaw the self hosted and the current revolt.chat build should always be on the same version. The documentation to setting up a self-hosted instance is very poor and if your not tech-savy you won't even bother if you looked at it.
People want documentation with readable instructions, pictures to go with it, & videos if applicable. This has been discussed multiple times in the Revolt chat server and the majority of contributors including the staff refuse to improve the documentation because they think you should just be able to understand it and if you don't oh well. They won't help you with any self-hosted questions or issues you may come across you are pretty much on your own when it comes to a self-hosted instance.
Another deterrent factor is not all functions Revolt has is open source. To find out there is parts of revolt that is proprietary comes to a shock since Revolt is heavily advertised as free open source software. Now technically they may have the right to do so because according to the GNU a software can be licensed as is but there is a technical clause that if there is a feature someone wants to replicate the owner must provide the instructions on how to replicate the feature. But if your looking to challenge any FOSS over a thing like this you may want to seek legal council for the fine print because it may say that on the GNU website but the small tiny text that is the fine print will say something otherwise that contradicts the long "short term explanation".
This is what's been going on over at Revolt after everything said and done my conclusion is this. Revolt is a chat application that does not respect your privacy and gives away your information freely. If you're going to use it be very careful. What you say in servers bot owners can access, read, & write to save. Support is unprofessional and will leave you hanging & disclose your information with third parties.
It's going to take a long time restructuring and open transparency reports to make me want to think about giving them another chance with my information. The teenagers at Revolt have a lot of learning and growing up to do before being taken seriously when it comes to privacy, security, & understanding the importance of protecting peoples data from anyone even themselves.
