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?

You can spin up a regular instance, check “Close signups” and uncheck “Enable federation” in your admin settings, which will make your instance a private forum that is accessible from the internet.

Archiving publicly available content is not illegal, otherwise sites like archive.org would have been taken down ages ago.

Users are where the content is, and most people don’t have the energy to support a growing website that lacks content when another website that is full of content exists. Reddit’s advantage was that people only needed one account on one website to see content related to diverse interests. Mirroring Reddit content (while being transparent about the fact that the content is mirrored) can help the Threadiverse gain this advantage and make it easier to retain users who will eventually contribute to the Threadiverse.

(In Reddit’s early days, it was full of Digg crossposts too.)

The purpose of the bot is to make Reddit’s content accessible without being forced to use a corporate platform. The value Reddit has, in my opinion, is the wealth of knowledge that is stored there. The content is often stale, but most of us have experienced finding a solution to a problem from a years-old Reddit thread. If you used Reddit for social interactions, this bot is not the solution for you.

Is the body of the post not appearing on certain apps or something? There is a summary that explains the bot’s purpose in the post body.

What “ages ago”?! It was purchased in 2014 and shut down in 2015!

Oh wait, that was 8 to 9 years ago.

I still have my Alien Blue installation after all these years and it’s working for me too, probably because the number of users left is so low that it can operate under the new API limits. Unfortunately, Reddit could easily kill off Alien Blue by revoking its API key.

Explained in the post. A very common complaint I see in the migration discussions is “my hobby’s community isn’t on the Fediverse/doesn’t have an active community like Reddit so I still have to visit Reddit”. Unless they intend to participate in that Reddit community (which most users don’t), they can bring their community’s knowledge here instead of giving Reddit more traffic.

Ideally, this bot won’t need to exist in the future. But right now, a lot of the inertia with the migration comes from “the content that interests me is only on Reddit and I don’t have time to manage two social media accounts, so I’d rather stay on Reddit and join the Fediverse once the content that interests me is here”. It’s unrealistic to expect a lot of users to jump to the Fediverse for a purely moral reason, as if their practical concerns don’t matter.