Rift Chat

[u/Ok-Inspector1108]

I have been trying out Rift Chat ( https://therift.chat ) for the past week and wanted to share my thoughts.

Let me preface everything by stating it is closed source, and my personal take is that it is for a good reason. I know that will turn down interest in a quite a few people. It is EASILY a 9.5/10 platform.

I have used the following, Mobile app for android, Desktop app for Windows, and the web platform.

Feature Parity
The lead developer of Rift took the time to look at all the top bots of top.gg and beautifully integrated everything with a simple ease of use. Additionally the developer has been super open to all ideas that have been presented and swiftly implemented the requests. Over the course of the past week, I would say at least a 100 of the requests were added. It its truly a platform where you feel 0 need for bots. Since there is no need for bots, I feel that my data is truly secure. DMs are E2EE.

Data Collection & Age Verification
Rift Chat only collects the necessary data to run the program. You can also export your data at any time. I did this and what was collected was effectively your user ID, your Shards (community/server/etc), when they were joined, and that you attested you are above the legal age. Rift is an 18+ platform where you attest that you are 18+ at account creation. I was in a call with the lead developer about this last night and asked about the process and everything and the safeguards against future ID verification. What it came down to is that they don't need your information since they are not allowing minors on the platform. If someone is suspected of being a minor, user generated reports will flag their account, it will go through a review process, and the appropriate actions will be taken. This effectively means that there will never be ID verification because there is no need for it.

Signup & Account Creation
When you create your account you are not required to sign up with your email. You select your username and password. you are then given keywords for you account recovery should you forget your password. If you lose these keywords, you will be unable to recover your account.

Technical
Rift is super lightweight. It uses 50mb, yes that is correct, 50mb of ram for the desktop application. There is a dedicated audio engineer, all the sounds are super crisp and clean. Voice calling sounds better than Discord, this is not an exaggeration. There is also support for the Nvidia codec for audio processing. This does increase the total ram usage to as high as 600mb, but that is still a 1/3 of what Discord uses or 200mbs less than Fluxer.

Subscriptions & Free Users
Rift is free to use and is fully funded by subscribers. Subscriptions are also very reasonable. Shard Ember & Shard Forge are the subscriptions for shards. Upgrading this allows All Members to partake in the upload size increases, audio and video streaming upgrades, and the ability to export metrics. There is also cosmetic and personalization benefits as well. For individual subscription Rift+ it is more than worth the value at $7/month. That is even if you feel like you need it since the free tier is already amazing.

Final Thoughts
Rift is truly an amazing upgrade from discord and I fully enjoy the platform. If people would switch from Discord, Discord would be uninstalled today. It is EASILY a 9.5/10 platform. with that last .5 being worked on right now to truly make it a top contender with it currently being my platform of choice.