this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2026
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https://stoat.chat/download
Stoat looks promising as an open source alternative
Looks promising...
but why is it always electron?
FOR REAL BRO
Because people want fancy animations, images, videos, stylized text, etc. And the easiest way to accomplish that is to just use a browser under the hood.
Theyve been around for a few years and I'm still not really impressed. No E2EE, No federation if the people running it go belly up. You might as well use signal ATP.
As far as I understand it can be somewhat federated using the matrix protocol? https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/stoat/
This isn't federation, its a bridge. Theres also a bridge for Discord, Telegram and Signal, but none of those are federated either
Ah I get it now!
I just tried to sign up for it. Installed app and signed up, it wouldn't go through. So I go to web interface and create an account there. I've waited ONE HOUR for email verification, and NOTHING. Asked to resend verification, they made me click through 5 captivas, and still NOTHING. Moving on from stoat.
Misconfiguration with SMTP is likely or their SMTP server is under maintenance and you just tried at a poor time.
Granted for a production environment there should be some notice to users.
It's even simpler than that... Their SMTP server is just hosted on a homelab and has notoriously been terrible for uptime. They've had consistent issues with emails not being sent or received and that's not even the icing on the shit sundae for Revolt/Stoat.
Which is a great reason to dump SMTP altogether. It's a messaging platform FFS. If you need to send someone a message, do it on the platform.
Honest question, would something like stoat allow forum threads like in discord but being accessible through a classic forum style webpage through matrix protocol in order for it to beindexed by the wider web?
Why would you do this though...
Because one of the things I find most annoying about discord is how the information is much less accessible. Before you could search something on google and find some niche forum talking about it. Nowadays that forum is probably a discord server and the information is hard to find
How does running it through Matrix solve that problem?
It doesn’t, I just like the matrix protocol for privacy.
Absolutely not.
Stoat (formerly Revolt) is an utter shit-show of alt left and right extremists and the development is dead in the water. They’ve claimed to be working on feature parity with Discord for years now. Not to mention the developers jumping ship and the whole “Stoat” rebrand. Not to mention, their email verification server is just hosted on a homelab setup which has lead to a plethora of users being unable to receive their verification emails, resulting in them requiring a manual approval via emailing in… which guess what… those are also failing to come through!
Don’t touch Revolt/Stoat. It’s no better.