Revolt Against Discord

Handmade Cities is leaving Discord by end of the year.

Time to Revolt against Discord. Savor the refrain while it lasts, because Revolt will become Stoat eventually. Their rebrand doesn’t change anything about joining now. Your Revolt account will stay the same. Indeed, I’ll call it “Revolt” for the rest of this post.

You might wonder why this move needs to happen in the first place. First, it’s a principles thing. We want to own chat data to align closer with the values on our About page. On Discord, meanwhile, communities can be (and have been) shut down with no recourse. Second, there’s real cybersecurity concerns. Discord has asked for government ID verification and passed that data to third parties — nearly 100k IDs were exposed in a vendor breach. That’s not acceptable. Ironically, it appears to be their customer support and “Trust & Safety” teams that were collecting this data. Now it’s in the hands of hackers:

“The hackers who compromised Discord are now sharing examples of what they say is stolen data, including selfies of Americans and Canadians holding up IDs.” -PCMag

So much for trust. Or safety.

Finally, note that I’m encouraging people to touch grass. I’ve sketched a path for top engineers to live without addictive social media. Revolt as an invite‑only, verified‑human space is a core piece of that plan.

Did you just say invite-only? How do I join Revolt?

Invitations will come only from official meetup hosts or directly from me. If we’ve met at a conference, meetup, or co‑working session, message us and we’ll likely invite you. I’m the one who grants the Verified Human badge and I’ll do so if a host can vouch for you. This is an imperfect system and it still requires moderation, of course, but it places a premium on trust over open discoverability. Which is exactly the point.

Addressing common objections

There are three typical arguments against using Revolt that I should tackle here.

1. “Revolt will be a walled garden like Discord and therefore not crawlable.” I believe that private, ephemeral conversations should remain private. We can curate and surface the best technical discussions into a public wiki so important knowledge isn’t lost.

2. “Abner is a dictator." Guilty as charged. I’m running this as a BDFL, with a decade of organizing Handmade since my early college days. There’s an escape hatch though, because every meetup host can dump their mailing list locally. I don’t lock people in. This cuts both ways too: hosts who violate community values – e.g. running meetups sponsored by Microsoft – are cut off from the water tap. They won’t be able to send newsletters nor access new subscribers to the mailing list.

3. “There’s some friction and missing features.” Revolt is lighter than Discord. I call it Discord Lite™ and it carries a few annoyances:

• You can’t point the Revolt app to a custom domain. There is a workaround for this: visit revolt.handmadecities.com in your phone’s native browser (Safari on iOS). Now hit Add to Home Screen and the PWA you just installed behaves like any other electron app.
• Missing bells & whistles. There’s no message pinning, no threads, and limitations on emoji reactions. These are irritations to me, not deal breakers. Many people find Revolt snappier with zero loading times.
• Lack of E2EE. Discord has this problem too. Handmade Cities policy is to safeguard private DMs and never inspect their contents, but you’re choosing to trust us instead of Discord. Never disclose sensitive material on our servers; instead you should ask the person you’re talking to for their Signal username and hop over there.

Final Notes

To summarize: Our new Revolt is invite‑only. You must be a verified human; either I know you, or a meetup host does. The easiest way to get invited is to attend an in‑person event. If this feels like too much, consider this your warning: the Discord goes kaput after New Year’s Eve. Exchange contact info, save any important links, and follow our public newsletter to stay updated, with or without Revolt/Stoat.

Your indie organizer,
Abner Coimbre