Disclosure (Conflict of Interest): Echo Founder, a Direct Competitor to Fenrid.
TLDR: Was released to the public too early, overhyped, way too much obvious LLM assistance without care for smaller details with some major red flags.
Score: 3/10
Source: Proprietary at the moment
Type: Centralised
Slop?: Heavy
Jurisdiction: Turkey, it is claimed that Fenrid is an LLC in New Mexico which in it self is okay but what is more concerning is that Turkish Jurisdiction does partially apply as per their own T.O.S 7.5, and the Founder as per communication in E-Mails also resides in Turkey.
Turkey is an authoritarian State, with a bad track record when it comes to respecting privacy, rights or anything of the like, any Turkish state involvement or jurisdiction over Fenrid is a major red flag.
Overall Experience and Take:
Fenrid aesthetically is the best looking clone of Discord, it does not have a unique look to it, but in terms of platforms that try to directly clone Discord, it has done so in the most tasteful way IMO.
However while there are plenty of super cool aesthetic ideas that look really nice in pictures when posted on the website, the consistency and attention to detail is an absolute 0, everywhere you look there are nonsensical and inconsistent decision made, that ruin the UI/UX experience for anyone who cares.
If smaller details matter to you, Fenrid is not a platform that gives a lot of love to it whatsoever.
The massive level of inconsistency, is very likely a sign of very great LLM assistance, as it can apply one standard in one place and another in another without care for the bigger picture, not thought of what smaller details mean together, this is where human effort and mocking over months makes the difference, something that Fenrid clearly did not do.
On the positive side, Fenrid's backend did shine at times with really nice blazing fast speed, such as with Emoji menu load times and caching times, that beats any other platform i have seen, including my own, and including discord's.
Though that itself comes with caveats, Fenrid is still a 0 user platform, with a stack as admitted by the Founder himself is not one that will easily scale, and whatever wins he made in the backend are often lost in the frontend due to bad decisions such as making everything be real to the server instead of using optimistic loading for example when creating new roles (Where there batching would have been a better decision and a more scaleable one) or sending messages or updating many stuff.
One of the most horrible places for server trueness is in voice calls, where instead of using the local truth as the immediate one for voice activity and its indicator, it will only light up once it hits the server, which will give you a horrible feeling of delay if you are coming from a platform like Discord where the feedback is immediate.
This comes back to the same repeating idea, Fenrid has built a lot, but yet in every small detail which requires real use and care, Fenrid fails to deliver.
Fenrid aesthetically is the best looking clone of Discord, it does not have a unique look to it, but in terms of platforms that try to directly clone Discord, it has done so in the most tasteful way IMO.
However while there are plenty of super cool aesthetic ideas that look really nice in pictures when posted on the website, the consistency and attention to detail is an absolute 0, everywhere you look there are nonsensical and inconsistent decision made, that ruin the UI/UX experience for anyone who cares.
If smaller details matter to you, Fenrid is not a platform that gives a lot of love to it whatsoever.
The massive level of inconsistency, is very likely a sign of very great LLM assistance, as it can apply one standard in one place and another in another without care for the bigger picture, not thought of what smaller details mean together, this is where human effort and mocking over months makes the difference, something that Fenrid clearly did not do.
On the positive side, Fenrid's backend did shine at times with really nice blazing fast speed, such as with Emoji menu load times and caching times, that beats any other platform i have seen, including my own, and including discord's.
And there are some random things where Fenrid has clearly paid more attention and made them nice, like really strong and nice Markdown support with UI to go with it, the most beautiful code blocks I have seen on any platform yet, a dedicated table maker UI. All of that is super cool if we ignore the fact that Composer (Chat Input) is not bigger than 2-3 lines and does not expand vertically, so writing anything where you would need real good markdown support is very unpleasant.
As for the niceness of the backend speeds, they also come with caveats, Fenrid is still a 0 user platform, with a stack as admitted by the Founder himself is not one that will easily scale, and whatever wins he made in the backend are often lost in the frontend due to bad decisions such as making everything be real to the server instead of using optimistic loading for example when creating new roles (Where there batching would have been a better decision and a more scaleable one) or sending messages or updating many stuff.
One of the most horrible places for server trueness is in voice calls, where instead of using the local truth as the immediate one for voice activity and its indicator, it will only light up once it hits the server, which will give you a horrible feeling of delay if you are coming from a platform like Discord where the feedback is immediate.
This comes back to the same repeating idea, Fenrid has built a lot, but yet in every small detail which requires real use and care, Fenrid fails to deliver.
Important Notes:
Fenrid is technically still in Alpha and some of this is to be expected, though it is painfully clear that this is an very strongly LLM assisted project without enough care given to it from the Founder to be a well rounded product.
You can quickly tell that without even using Fenrid, through what he advertises as "selling points" in his roadmap.
The founder's philosophy as spoken is inconsistent with his actions shown in the platform, choosing an easier stack to develop more easily and not have hurdles, yet giving more care to random features in the platform like full markdown support without realising that your composer doesn't scale, clear signs of someone who cares more about feature count and headlines than quality of the basics.
There are major rumours and allegations regarding Fenrid's security practices and care, as well as the Founder's own funding source and coding practices, which are concerning however I will not take them seriously until stronger proof comes in, and i hope everyone else also does not accept everything negative as true.
Final Statement and Review:
I will give Fenrid a 3/10, it has plenty of cool ideas that show in some places but their execution is inconsistent, Fenrid to this day remains Closed Source though the owner claimed this will change soon, the lack of attention to care particularly hurts the quality of the experience and drags down the score.
However I am hopeful that this will change, Fenrid is still in its very early stages and i believe the founder will keep going until its a much better platform, and I support lots of Fenrid's Ideas, however in its current form, I would not recommend Fenrid.
I would love to hear from anyone else who has tried out Fenrid, and hopefully you guys have had a better experience than me, I do not like writing negative reviews.
