this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2025
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Stoat (formerly known as Revolt) is a selfhostable, FOSS replacement for discord [Group chats and voice channels you can join any time].

Cool new name, however not as easy to use in other languages.

Voice chat is stil not officialy implemented.

Self-hosting there. Apparently nothing to do for you if you had already hosted before the name change.

The Android app has unfortunately disappeared (not been updated) on F-droid.

Edit: added short description for clarification

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[–] renegadespork@lemmy.jelliefrontier.net 20 points 2 days ago (2 children)

This seems like a cool project. I especially love the UI's similarity to Discord, but it still has a long road ahead to be a viable chat platform IMO.

I've been periodically checking in with ~~Revolt~~ Stoat for about a year now, and personally, the two things that I'm waiting for are:

  1. Voice chat - It seems like this is coming, but they had to clean up a bunch or tech debt first
  2. Federation - Self-hosted chat is great, but not being able to talk to other servers is incredibly limiting for a social tool. AFAIK they're not planning on implementing this. This is likely a deal-breaker for a lot of folks.

I'm currently running Matrix synapse, and while matrix is kinda a messy ecosystem, it's really hard to compete with its maturity and adoption in the FOSS / Self-Hosted space.

Also, not super important, but this blog post reads like it's AI generated.

[–] fixmycode@feddit.cl 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

what's really federation on a system that isolates conversations per server? can you reply to a message from one server on another? maybe the main thing would be single account, because even friend lists from multiple accounts could be merged

what's really federation on a system that isolates conversations per server?

That's like asking why Lemmy needs federation if posts are tied to a Community.

No federation means:

  • Every server requires a different user account to join a room
  • Every server needs to be accessed from a different URL
  • Users in different servers cannot direct message, call, or friendlist one another

Federated platforms aren't perfect, but they solve these problems.

[–] themagzuz@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

i honestly think that if revolt had federation, then it would be the obvious choice for me, but alas. personally i'm still hopeful for polyproto getting off the ground, but the boring realistic choice for the time being is probably something like XMPP + mumble

[–] aBundleOfFerrets@sh.itjust.works 1 points 14 hours ago

It looks like polyproto doesn’t have any intent to implement voice chat or screen sharing?

[–] renegadespork@lemmy.jelliefrontier.net 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm getting an HTTP 522 from that link. What's Polyproto?

Also, is there a reason you're not considering Matrix?

[–] themagzuz@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 20 hours ago

oh yea their website seems to be down. surely a good sign... in the meantime, you can look at the website/spec through their codeberg repos.

i'm not a huge fan of matrix because it seems very bad to selfhost. from my understanding, if anyone using your homeserver joins a big channel, your homeserver will have to store the entire history of that channel and keep it up to date. on top of that, it very much seems like the spec isn't being developed by the community, but more that element implements some feature and then forces that into the spec. also polyproto claims to be much more resilient, allowing you to migrate to a new homeserver, even if your old one is already dead.

also a lot of matrix's funding comes from crypto, ai and venture capital, so i think it's just a matter of time before the whole project becomes completely subsumed by capital interests