Revolt relies on community self hosting last I looked at it

I think on the contrary they are not big on self-hosting nor federation so they have a better chance at becoming a “mass” solution. While you can self-host, it doesn’t federate like Matrix and in practice everyone is on the “first-party” instance (revolt.chat).

Requires a phone number.

Which one? Revolt?

In all fairness, I think the FOSS community lacks good messaging tools so people end up using:

• for personal messaging: WhatsApp (very popular in Europe), iMessage (in the US), Telegram (Brazil and Asia)
• for communities: Discord and Telegram
• for businesses: Slack (popular in tech) and Teams (~all the rest)

Signal has been gaining momentum for personal messaging but its unrelenting focus on privacy comes with some significant usability tradeoffs: (1) it doesn’t have a web-app that I can use from other computers that I don’t control (eg a work laptop), (2) it doesn’t sync well between my phone (primary) and desktop apps (secondary), (3) it doesn’t have a “bots” API like Telegram does so its creative uses are very limited, (4) third-party clients are officially disallowed.

Matrix might be a good fit for communities and businesses (which have very distinct moderation needs as in a business you can just report users to HR hehe), but in my experience it (or its flagship client Element) has lots of performance issues that makes it unpleasant to use. It also reminds me of XMPP with its different extensions and not knowing which clients supported which extensions; for example, go to https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/ and click around to discover that many clients don’t support threads yet. All that being said, I think Matrix is still the one that’s best positioned to win the communities.

For businesses, I think the “open core” model is pretty competitive: you have Rocket Chat, Mattermost, and Zulip. In fairness I think they made significant strides so I’d consider them pretty successful in their own regard, despite Teams dominating the market by abusing Microsoft’s monopoly and Slack’s popularity + coupling with Salesforce. Now, the issue is that those three “open core” software aren’t very useful for communities because again, their moderation models are very different. Moderation is a ~non-issue in a business setting where you have HR and other functions to enforce the rules and penalise accordingly.

Long story short, what’s your FOSS alternative to Discord for communities? Revolt maybe?

The article is a year old, fyi.