Revolt 2023: New Review!

Hello everyone it's 2023 & we are writing a new review on Revolt the chat app. As you may have read our previous reviews this is the third segment to let you know whats happening.

Recap

Last time we discussed how the client was getting a complete rework & voice chat coming. Well since then everything is still being developed & nothing has changed since. We are still awaiting to see an update with something new.

Good, Bad, & Ugly

The Good

While Revolt is being developed the team has also focused on other projects on the side which may be the reason we haven't seen an update. Gifbox is one of the side projects which is a replicated clone of Imgur. I imagine they did this to not rely on Imgur as a third party source for dropping gifs in chat like you can on Discord. They spend time generating images & memes to flood gifbox to make it appear to have a heavy userbase already when there's been no advertisements or spread of word about it you probably didn't hear about gifbox till you read this.

Another project which the team at Revolt has been spending tremendous amounts of time on is called lightspeed.tv. Lightspeed is another replication of a Youtube clone site where people can upload their videos to. I imagine they made a Youtube clone site to administrate it so they can always promote & feature their own stuff without having to compete with anyone & promote selected friends content with ease.

The Bad

As they are working on 3 projects simultaneously progress will take longer before Revolt receives it's promised update of a complete rewrite from scratch. Voice chat still isn't working yet & will be when the rework comes just how long you may have to wait may be another year or two. In our last review we talked abit about customer service aka support from Revolt there still has not been an improvement in that area & those are big negative points in our review. Being friendly is important & being attentive to your userbase is more important then that.

The Ugly

Using all 3 services Revolt, Lightspeed, & Gifbox is giving Revolt a lot of your data. Your chats, images, & videos all logged stored for whatever purpose they see fit. Lets go back to the site & talk about the part of the slogan where it says "you can be sure your conversations are confidential & data is secure." Revolt doesn't have E2EE (end to end encryption) so confidential is a lie because everyone's chat is stored & any staff member can read from the beginning to the present.

Revolt is a internet group they are not an LLC or a company so your trusting your data to a group of mixed teenagers & adults ranging from 14-21 who are volunteers. There is no information or proof that Revolt enforces any guidelines to ensure it's volunteers don't misuse the data they've collected while working on the project. This can be scary to know but you should be informed so your aware of the risks to your data you submit to them.

Since Revolt is just a group there is no regulation meaning if someone was abusing data it's up to Paul Makles (Insert) at his discretion. He could choose to not care & allow it but how would you know? How could you trust a group with your data when they share the info in other groups or networks?

This was used in our previous review & we are using it again to make a point. After our last review pointing out how Rexogamer wasn't a staff member Paul Malkes quickly made a staff role on Revolt & added all major contributors to the staff role. The screenshot shows proof that Rex admits all staff members are volunteers & a private email was shared in a group chat.

If you remember from the last review the email was about a bot breaking privacy policy which he shared the email to the bot developer & group then asked them to DM me rather then reviewing the info & getting back to me one on one. Would you trust your data with that still might well lets go over another circumstance.

There is a user who has been mass spamming account creation flooding servers with spam messages. I had to build a gate wall to block off my members from being bugged by the spam troll others just have to deal with the spam. So as we see in this picture a random user ask for the data & insert gloating about how much of his messages he collected. Would you trust your messages with a team that gives them away to people for free?

Customer service aka support seems to be Revolt's weakpoint. I have asked multiple times how to get my server verified & have been ignored where other people ask & get a response of it goes by circumstance then through DMs it seems to happen for some people. Newcomers get their support questioned immediately answered but after 6 months your not new anymore so your questions may have a delayed response. 

In my opinion Revolt holds a prejudice against select people based on username & country of origin.To not point out names of individuals I invite you to observe the general chat of Revolt Lounge itself. You will see there is a major prejudice against Americans. Revolt doesn't warn or suppress it's users for condescending Americans & their culture. Revolt condones this & even staff members add antic-dotes to encourage it but god forbid you say one word about homosexuals, transgenders, or something wrong about the UK.

Revolt doesn't display time in the 12H AM|PM format this has been heavily asked why. You will get rude responses & be told how it's not a major important feature to add immediately. I bet you when the rewrite from scratch update releases time still won't be displayed in 12H AM/PM format & you can surely believe prejudice is why.

4/23

As of April I have finally received word about my verified server status. I was denied with no real explanation given.

The bottom underline meaning of this is there's no real reason not to so they reworded the guidelines just to make up a reason to say no. When a developer does this it's an act of prejudice. The guidelines were changed after discussions of my server well that's specific targeting now isn't it?

My server Coding Simpletons is focused around the advocacy of privacy showing newcomers how to keep your data secure & encrypt files. Another server which was on Revolt at one point in time called Privacy Tools was identical in the same category of subjects focused around privacy. The only difference between the two is Privacy Tools has paid sponsors & a organization website & Coding Simpletons does not.

It's clear that Revolt has a personal vendetta through passive aggressive acts. How could you trust a team that holds a prejudice against Americans & changes the rules when you are the exception to them but they choose to deny specifically? Now the guidelines state "Verification is intended to provide protection for server owners from copy cats and to provide authenticity to users as such we are not just giving it out to anyone because that would defeat the purpose." As we have witnessed anyone who makes a bot on Revolt automatically gets one.

Focusing around the specific sentence "we are not currently verifying generic servers that centre around a topic unless it meets one of the first two criteria. Though in special circumstances, well known on platform communities may also be considered." 

A server with 100 emojis no bot or anything just provides custom emojis by being apart of the server. Any server can hold 100 custom emojis there is nothing unique about this.

A server focused around a general subject & not apart of any pre-existing community outside of Revolt just a generic programming server made on Revolt. I show these just to point the hypocrisy & prove my claim on how Revolt handles things.

Data Trusting

It's important now more then ever to know whos getting your data & where is it going? I received a phone call one day which was a prank call of a happy Birthday song from spoungebob squarepants. I don't know how the cranker got my number but I do a little technique to somewhat track where it might have possibly come from.

As i'm sure most of you already do this when I register an account to a place I use multiple disposable email addresses. In addition I use fake date of births on websites & I log the info in my database. I keep track of the date of births so I can possibly narrow done which site it came from. 6 months after I joined Revolt the email address I used suddenly got bombarded with waves of spam mail for gay resorts & escapes every single day.

The day I got the prank call & the age the age they said I turned matched the DOB for my Revolt account. Now I'm not saying Revolt did it but if there is any compromise or data breach that has not yet been discovered it's coming from there.

Sidetracking

The owner Paul Malkes is focused on too many side projects instead of working on Revolt & spends a lot of time playing steam vr games such as beatsaber. Another sidetracking activity setting up a server for Stable Diffusion. As you may know Stable Diffusion has become a hot comodity & everyone is using it writing guides. 

Nothing wrong with taking interest but when you're going out of your way to setup a server, write your own instructions & guides when each application already has it's own installation instructions & docs to guide people starting it's redundant. You should be focused on your project Revolt not trying to play support to help people install Automatic1111's Stable Diffusion & learn it when you won't help people install a self hosted version of revolt chat.

The Bottom Line

You shouldn't trust Revolt with your data. The team is a mixature of teenagers & adults who only make promise by the slogan of the website. There is no guidelines for staff because they are all volunteers.

Your private emails will be shared in staff group chats that are held on Discord, Guilded, or Revolt as the staff has a presence on all platforms. Your information may be given freely to anyone. Revolt the chat platform itself is partially open source certain aspects are kept proprietary to prevent self hosted sites from gaining dominance over revolt.chat.

Discovery & Gifbox are proprietary discovery is a site embeded in an iframe in Revolt to list the display of servers, bots, & ui themes. They made these proprietary so your self hosted Revolt would appear lacking because it does not have discovery or gifbox to search for gifs to add in chat (not a feature yet). This is a contradiction to the GNU open source philosophy as a open source project is suppose to have all aspects of it open sourced. They get around this by saying the open source is as is. It's a legality that's loops around the license's condition of if a user wants to replicate a certain feature the original software developer must provide instructions on how to replicate. 

By making certain aspects work through iframes on separate websites technically makes that aspect not apart of the software because it's handled by another webstie. Even though this isn't third party on a legal standpoint it is. In my opinion it's a terrible way to screw self hosted users out of features only to make self-hosted seem less appealing. It's a tactic to force people to stay on revolt.chat & the developers encourage you not to self host.

In my own words I must say what kind of developers make a self hostable application then gets mad at people for wanting to self host it rather then stay on your website of it? In recent events an online romania internet sensation Andrew Tate was accused by Paul Malkes of stealing Revolt. How can he steal whats free & open sourced well the claim was for making heavy modifications & not posting them open sourced.

Well it seems nothing can be done as the GNU & copyright laws have a very limited scope on when dealing with 2 different people in different countries. This is irony since Paul Malkes complained about how Tate's modifications weren't made open source & yet he doesn't want to open source Discovery.

This is an example of what happens when you do crummy things like not support the people who want to self host by discouragement or simply ignoring them. Someones going to find a way & do it using what they know to get around legalities. In the end Karma will get you when your a one sided developer & you don't have consideration for everybody.

As we are always watching we will write another review later in time. We hope the group Revolt grows up & becomes mature responsible ethical members of the developing society & takes all into consideration.