Nerdy Privacy-Focused Discord Alternatives!

with the immense amount of bogus that I deal with on Discord I asked myself is Discord the best chat platform now I already beat the Gilded horse to death so I'll have a video in the card thing I'm not going to talk about that I'm actually going to talk about Revolt which is basically a Discord clone in a sense and I'm also going to talk about something called element which is based on the Matrix Network now I'm going to be going through both of these Alternatives and basically filling out the report card to see how well they perform compared to Discord now the first thing I always start with is how idiot proof is this chat platform could a like myself actually be able to use this damn thing so starting off with a Revolt if you go on the website you can click on open web app seems pretty straightforward and I get to create an account so making your account is actually extremely easy it's just it's basically like Discord it gives you a verification email you need to do and once you verify your account you can just log on in and I can set my own username oh no text-to-speech of course I'm going to add spaces because I want to be the OG so it starts off kind of just like Discord nothing too crazy it tells me about approach reporting I can view older updates don't really care nothing too crazy I'd give it 5 out of 5. now on the other hand we have elements and elements a little bit more different you have to click get started then apparently you need to contact sales because this is more of a business focused app but you can scroll down and there's personal just want the free app for personal use of course get the app and I'm going to open it up in the web just to have a head-to-head comparison so going to create accounts there's a lot more options I can log in with Google which is nice if I want to but I can also host account on I'm just going to stick with matrix.org and just pretend I'm a Discord user trying to find something that's different and logging in was honestly straightforward nothing too crazy but you actually get a little bit more onboarding and hand-holding do you want to create something for friends and family co-workers and teams or online community members now in terms of onboarding element is pretty okay I'd give it a 4 out of five my main gripe is that when you're on the website it had all the business stuff and for most people when they see that they get a little confused I know scrolling down is almost impossible for a Discord user now the next thing I want to talk about is how Grandma approved is this bad boy how easy is it to use this chat platform so with Revolt it's pretty straightforward it's just like Discord you have the things on the side like discover Revolt add a server and settings but if you have no idea how to use it it does show you this big screen in the middle telling you you can open settings discover Revolt give feedback join tester server all this stuff which is really nice to see so I'm going to start off by changing my profile I'm going to open my settings and as you can see it's uh pretty similar you can click edit profile and I guess I can just uh oh there we go profile picture click on that I can have my own little profile Banner too for free oh God that looks beautiful and you have your own little bio and that was honestly extremely straightforward I mean nothing too crazy as you could tell the background doesn't work too well with my text but if I scroll down it also tells me if I want to change my username I can head over to my account settings it's exactly like Discord nothing too crazy I'd give it a Solid 5 out of 5. now in terms of element hopefully it's the same thing as you can tell when you first joined go on the App it tells you to invite your friends set up your profile turn on notifications so I'm just going to click set up my profile it's exactly the same as Discord I can also click on Quick Settings at the bottom left but click on your profile but it's the same type of customization I can upload a profile picture that was quick click save I can change my email address I'm not a huge fan that it's not invisible if you just click on your settings with a Revolt you have to click on reveal so while there isn't a lot of features in terms of customization for your profile on elements and I'll talk about features later in terms of ease of use of just changing your profile pretty straightforward 5 out of five now next up is joining a public server so with Revolt I can click on Discover Revolt or just click on the little Compass thing and I can see a whole bunch of servers so there's the Revolt lounge and there's activity and member count which is really good to see is this just a good server or is there no one on it just a little off topic but there are some interesting communities on here and I guess that's just par for the course it's a Discord alternative where there's a lot more freedom I'm just gonna go to cat girl Dungeon Because I think that really matches with my personal beliefs and I can accept invite and that was pretty straightforward nothing too crazy now I do have one gripe with this system in fact if I try to join a server on Discord if you click add a server it'll pop up with you know you can enter in a link but on Revolt it's just you can create a server so I'm assuming if someone sends you an invite link you can only put it in your browser which is a little bit awkward to be honest I'd give it a four out of five now with elements it's a little bit different as you can tell on the left there's create a space there's home and finding a public server is just in a little bit of a different place it's right up here explore rooms and that shows you all the public rooms that we looked at before a couple of issues that I personally have is that it's hard to filter by language for example I was going to join gentian impact but uh it's in a language that I don't entirely understand but you do have a little bit more customization you know how there's like the matrix.org server you can actually look at different types of servers which is cool but also complex it makes it a little difficult if you don't understand what's going on but I'm might as well join the Raspberry Pi server because that seems pretty on par for what most people would use element for you know all the programming nerds and as you see when I click on join I get to preview the server and I'm going to click join the discussion now overall joining this Raspberry Pi server it revealed a lot of things that I'm going to complain about in the future but it was a lot more complex than it should have been it was very much information dense when you click on explore rooms it's just crammed in there it's not the best I'd give it like a three out of five it's functional but it's not pretty whatsoever now the final thing that Grammy mom might want to do on one of these chat apps is make their own server so with Revolt add a server just like Discord I'm going to call it Grand Memaw server click on Create and that was it that was it that was extremely easy just like Discord five out of five now with element if I click on create a space I can oh this is actually really nice I can make a public space that will be available to anyone or I can make it private an invite only and with element.io it has a better onboarding system of like hey you can upload your own little icon on you can set the name of the server so NTTS feet picks and you can even set a description like Saucy or something and click on Create and even when you create the server it holds your hand even more by telling you do you want to have a just me a private space or do you want to invite people and when you click on that it even holds your hand even more for onboarding so what projects are your team working on and you can create rooms for each of them and you can add more later too obviously what that did is created a whole bunch of rooms and I get to invite my teammates by putting in their email address or invite by username if I want to I'm just going to skip for now because I have no friends now overall that whole experience was actually really good you could have out your own public server you can have your own private server really easy to tell what you're doing this is honestly a Solid 5 out of five this is pretty damn good now before I get into the nitty-gritty of everything I want to talk about why people would use these types of platforms it's usually to get away from Discord but the main thing is privacy can I really just share bomb recipes on it and be completely fine well I'll start off with revolt and we're going to talk about encrypted chats right now Revolt isn't in entirely end-to-end encrypted so if I send my friend a bomb recipe uh you know revolts could come in and say you're not allowed to do that however it is evident from the website that they are planning on doing it but that's them promising something in the future right now it's not implemented so I wouldn't say it's the best for sharing your bomb recipes but with element things are a whole lot different you see up here it tells you secure sensitive Communications and an entire communications platform under your control with end-to-end encrypted voice video messaging and collaboration so it's end to end encrypted which is really good now I want to point out that element is actually running on The Matrix server infrastructure stuff an open network for secure decentralized communication and this really is kind of your golden ticket in terms of privacy because once again it's open source decentralized but the thing is is that you can self-host your own server that you control so instead of going on matrix.org and hosting your server on their platform you can make it on your own Raspberry Pi or on your own server which is really cool that means means that when you host it you are basically certain that no one's going to be able to read what is being sent and received it's just you and whoever else you're talking to but personally I'd feel pretty confident using the Matrix Network because it seems pretty good to me now in terms of Revolt you can have your own third party instance but it's kind of like a whole different platform in a sense if we just look down here it says what is a third party instance and basically it's someone that someone hosted themselves and you can't use your existing Revolt login on third-party instances and you must create a new account if you wish to use it so in terms of privacy I mean end-to-end encryption doesn't exist on revolt and self-hosting your own servers a little bit Jagged so that's kind of like a one out of five and in terms of elements and Matrix that's honestly five out of five in terms of privacy if you want to be super duper secure you can run your own instance if you just want to be semi-secure then you can use matrix.org it's Pretty stinking good now I'll dive a little bit into like open source stuff at the very end because I know most people don't care so the next question in terms of these Alternatives that I basically asked myself help is what is the performance of these apps and generally speaking with Revolt it's pretty good it's pretty Snappy when he joined a server it's nothing too crazy discover Revolt I want to join the Revolt Lounge it loads a little bit except invite it's kind of like the same speed as Discord nothing too crazy and uploading a file is it's it's okay it's not too awful it's pretty quick it's obviously not going to be as Snappy as Discord so I'm not going to give it a 5 out of 5 but it'll be like a four out of five it's pretty close it's acceptable most people won't really care too much it's not something that's going to drive you completely away from the platform now in terms of elements things are definitely a little bit different if I go back to home and I click on explore rooms it takes a little bit to see all these rooms let's say I want to see the gentian impact server so I click on join and it's loading and it still continue to load and it took a little bit to be fair it wasn't that bad when I tried joining this Russian server it was it just took quite a long time I think it took like 10 to 15 seconds for it to load as you can tell [Music] there we go that's enough time where I will honestly reconsider joining a lot of public servers because I don't want to wait like a minute or two just for the thing to load but in terms of loading chats and stuff past that it's pretty okay nothing too crazy so performance wise I'd give elements like a two out of five to be honest it's it's okay once you get past joining a server but joining a server is brutally slow depending on the size and speaking the size I think this is the best opportunity to talk about the user base because no one wants to join these platforms if there's no one on them so if I click on Discover Revolt as you can see the Revolt Lounge has 22 000 members and it varies a bit there's a lot of sub thousand servers there's of course the cat girl dungeon has a little bit more so there's not a lot of users but I'm gonna be completely honest Discord servers the best Discord servers on the planet are ones that have under 500 members so overall in terms of actual members this thing is basically dead compared to Discord so it's probably like a one or a two at most but I wouldn't consider that as super bad thing because you can get really good communities that are small and tight-knit in terms of elements of course if I go to explore rooms we're going to have that massive list and as you can tell there are a lot of servers that have over 10 000 members so while Discord is a 5 out of 5 I'd give element maybe or a two or a three you're not going to have the the numbers and the variety that Discord provides but you're still going to have some pretty substantial communities especially around different coding languages like python for example has 11 000 members now going back into Grand MI mod server let's look at the chat features so first off I'm going to send an extremely long message and uh as you can tell it kinda got cropped off so there is a maximum character limit and it seems to be around 2 000. now in terms of file size right I have a lot of stock footage because I use it all the time and I tried uploading a 21.5 megabyte file it's too large unfortunately I tried uploading a 15 megabyte file and as you could tell it did work so it seems like the upload limit might be around 20 megabytes which is above discord's default limit but compared to gilded I think it has like 500 megabytes which is way better they actually do have custom emojis it is an experiment feature and I go to my emoji picker look at that custom emojis that I can use literally anywhere which is cool although it kind of sucks that it's an experiment feature but I mean Once you turn it on you're kind of good to go now can I do voice chat well let's see let's create a channel and there is a voice channel so things are looking pretty good oh of course I have to have a channel name duh and now I have a channel name where I can click on call or however the heck it works oh there we go now it seems like I won't be able to screen share nor do a video call and finally I don't think I'd be able to upload a voice message and while Discord is technically working on it it is in the works of getting a voice message it's not available yet it's not available on Revolt but if we go to elements of course this is why I'm talking about it I can go to a channel and if I go to the bottom right I can do a voice message now since we're on element anyways let's see what we can do so we can obviously send text messages nothing too crazy you you have an emoji picker but it looks like you can't have any custom emojis and just to double triple check there is uh there's no custom emoji feature on here which is a little unfortunate but not a big deal if you can upload big files and let's get to uploading attachments let's go for gold let's upload this 98 megabyte stock footage file all right I'm going for gold I'm just gonna upload a raw dog video file of three and a half gigabytes and as you can tell the file size limit is 104.86 megabytes so we finally hit the cap but that is significantly better than what Discord has for free and what Revolt had for free now it looks like we can do voice calls except there's no one here to call we can also do video calls which is really good we also have threads which was absent in Revolt which is unfortunate and we have stickers of course oh you can add some stickers oh oh now you get your own little sticker pack thing that you can do now this is extremely convenient and easy to use you got Stickman little sheltie and in terms of screen sharing apparently it is possible but it requires requires a little bit of tomfoolery and I have no one else here to call but it is possible now overall in terms of like chat features I think element has a lot more features compared to revolt revolt is very much simplified and very Bare Bones however with elements things are really really really weird and it's kind of hard to explain but if you go to home we have different rooms so I have the Raspberry Pi room but it's not like a server it's just kind of one channel but while this is kind of a con it's a little confusing it does allow you to have a lot of flexibility so with this server here I can invite someone to the whole entire server or it can invite them just to the room that might be a really good thing or it might be really annoying it really just depends on the use case but overall I'd give element maybe a three out of five you know it's got the features but it's also kind of confusing and I feel like people might get stuck and caught up on things whereas revolts kinda the same thing it's a three out of five it's very familiar so people are going to latch onto it very quickly but in terms of just features it's not the best now that was just chatting features but let's talk about server customization now I'm going to whiz through this in terms of channels like I showed you before we can do text and voice we can create categories just like Discord name It Whatever the heck you want uh so Channel customization definitely not the best if I go to my server settings though we have the normal overview thing where I can add my own little server icon I can change the name I can add a description and I can put a banner for free you have different join messages in terms of categories this is where you actually organize the channels you have to go to the categories part and then drag it in and be able to rearrange it which is not the best for user experience in my personal opinion now in terms of moderation it's exactly like Discord if I just go back to the cat or not the categories the roles as you can see we can ban kick members and we can also time them out which is good it's just like muting them now with element it's obviously a whole lot different with their room system so I can click on ADD room I can create a new room and there's topic invisible to space members so private public which is cool that means you could have a private server and have a public room which is really fancy let's go to settings and now we have General so once again you can change your server there's visibility so you can have it private invite only space members you can have the preview option without even having to worry about all that Discord nonsense and then you have roles and permissions now the roles and permissions thing you have admin but you can also have custom level which is like a number based thing between zero and a hundred you can give people a default power level so they can just be the second they join they have admin and you can change a couple settings but uh that's kind of it and while I was perusing around I noticed that you can add a space to a space you manage which I'm not entirely sure what this means do you have like nested spaces yes apparently you have nested spaces which is it's nice having this freedom but most people are gonna find this way too complicated now no Community is complete without an auto moderation bot or some sort of fun bot and if I click on Discover Revolt we have our own little Bots tab here and thankfully there actually is an Auto mod bot which is great and it tells you how many servers it's in and if we click on it we can go through and add it to our server so I'm going to add it to uh Grand Memaw server and you can also add it to groups which is is really really good and when you add a bot to your server I mean it's kind of like Discord of course there's no slash help pop-up where it shows you all the commands but if you do slash help apparently the slash help command doesn't work oh no it does I'm just stupid or something bugged out I don't know and I get to set up prefix bot managers moderators and you have moderation rules so I guess you can create your own rules and this is this is exactly what I would expect from an easy to use bot if user sends more than five messages in three seconds delete the message you can send a message warn user kick user ban but obviously this is nowhere close to the amount of Bot support that Discord has so I'd have to give it a one I mean it's not a zero because there's actually Bots now with element if you actually go to your room info you can add widgets Bridges and Bots bridges are basically ways that you can communicate with people in different applications so we would link together your Discord server with your element server which is pretty cool and uh Bots are pretty straightforward you run a command it does something so with Wikipedia you would do exclamation mark Wikipedia and you'd search for something and widgets are basically liked it says in embed full-blown interactive apps into your rooms so with YouTube you can embed YouTube videos with Spotify you can embed the Spotify app however as you can see there are no Auto moderation Bots but it's really easy all you got to do is just Matrix Auto mod but maybe Matrix moderation but there we go you have free and open source things on GitHub now of course uh you have to host this yourself so in terms of community Bots and moderation element is it's difficult to be honest like it is not very user friendly if you were a new user you would not use the Bots and you would be frustrated it would be a one out of five but if you have a technical mindset and you're able to leverage the platform itself you could probably give it like a good three to four out of five of course you're not gonna have the beautiful Plug and Play nature of most Discord Bots where it is stupid easy to use now just to break up this info dense review I want to first thank you for watching this far but I want to point out some really cool features that I want Discord to put in their damn platform first off is this fav favorites tab I've been on this thing 24 7 and Discord has refused to do anything about it please for the love of God just put a favorites tab in Discord I use it all the time everyone needs to know the power of it now continuing on with my fangirling for these apps we go to all settings we have something extremely extremely helpful it's called an actual notifications tab where you get to customize things you can have different notifications and stuff but you can have keywords messages containing my display name my username messages containing room and containing keywords and you can have your own custom keywords so for example if someone needs help you can add in the keyword help this is awesome this is actually a better Discord feature as well really be nice to have something like this on Discord or just more customization please and one final thing to fangirl about no womans.io is Labs you can actually opt in to Beta features which would be really cool if Discord did something like this you know it would be nice to be able to just say yeah I don't mind trying out a possibly buggy beta feature so at least I can give feedback on it just something that'd be really cool to see on Discord now my next part on my little report card is how can I call up my e-girls on these chat platforms and if I go to device types with Revolt it's basically on everything it's on Windows it's on Android on iOS it's only a web app so not the best it's also on Linux of course Windows like I said and Mac OS so you're looking really good if you're not an iOS phone user and with elements same thing you got mobile you actually have it on the App Store you have it on the Google Play Store and F Droid and you have it for desktop Mac windows and Linux and of course you have it on the web browser like I've been using for this whole entire video now if you've watched this far you're probably a turbo nerd so let's get into the turbo nerd stuff so with revolts you can basically customize whatever the heck you want you could make your own custom clients if you want you can make your own custom Server Like I said you can self-host it but this thing is is open source up the Wazoo I mean it's all over GitHub information everywhere you can kind of do whatever the heck you want but it doesn't stop there because once again element is running off Matrix and this thing open source up the Wazoo it's all over the interwebs it's on get Hub you can make whatever the heck you want now since I don't know how to code and I'm really stupid this doesn't mean a whole lot but I know some of you are foaming at the mouth the second you hear open source but do you want to know what I foam at the mouth at custom themes on my clients and that's where we get into Revolt so like I said there's custom themes but if you're really lazy and you don't want to do your own CSS programming like myself you just click on Discover Revolt you click on themes and I mean there's themes made by the damn Community baby you pick whatever you want you want AMOLED this is absolutely wonderful it's natively built in I don't have to pay no stupid money for it now with elements we only have uh the great options of light or dark mode which is garbage but I'm teasing you because if we go to clients on the matrix.org website we can pick whatever clients we want because chances are it probably has some sort of theming element to it or a different look I mean the possibilities are Limitless you can make your own clients and have it look however the heck you want and we're talking about custom clients on mobile so I mean iOS Android whatever the heck you want if you still use the Windows phone probably able to put it on there if you want to go crazy for some reason you can have it as terminal based which I mean just looking at this thing is kind of crazy in itself open new image yes let me go on my Matrix server on the terminal but it gets it gets even better we have Webb and finally the best advice on planet Earth we have a matrix on the 3DS he finally were able to talk to our friends on her Nintendo DS we don't need PictoChat anymore as as you could tell Matrix and this whole system is very developer focused and people goof around with it so if you're very technically inclined person this thing is probably something you would absolutely love to get your hands on so looking at my final report card for both my handsome precious boys Revolt has this number once again I don't know what it is because I can't do live mathematical calculations I forgot what I said three minutes ago an element has this number out of whatever number it is it's arbitrary it doesn't really matter and that's really the main thing with both of these platforms they're very privacy focused so if you're a privacy oriented individual you can get around it but if you're someone that loves to Tinker and code I mean element.io and the Matrix net Network Amazing Revolt a little bit different if you want your Normie friends to get on something other than Discord you could use that if your Normie friends are still too Normie you could try out gilded but chances are they won't care and you'll stick to plain old Discord where you have to pay ten dollars a month to send your own little custom emoji but uh of course I'll still be sticking with Discord because it's a love-hate relationship it's just it's it's awful man it's draining at some point we're gonna have to have a divorce or some sort of mediation to really solve this relationship anyways bye bye my little sweethearts [Music]

Channel: No Text To Speech

Views: 237,971

Keywords: discord, discord alternative, discord server, discord mod, discord client, discord foss, foss discord, discord alternatives, open source discord, open source discord alternative, nerd discord, discord nerd, nerdy discord alternative, nerdy discord clone, discord clone, guilded discord, revolt discord, revolt, element.io, element.io discord, matrix discord

Id: 47EjvPIhAOU

Length: 24min 1sec (1441 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 15 2023