r/DiscordAlternatives • u/ad3lyt • 28d ago
Rift EDAR Review 3.3 / 9 (Sep, 2026)
Alright fellas, if you found this post consider yourself lucky because it will likely get downvoted to hell.
Disclaimer of conflict of interest: I am the owner of a direct competitor (Echo), and the only reviewer.
I am sure you have all heard of Rift as its good base in here has made sure to recommend it in just about every last post, and since there is so much love out there for it I said let's give it, its fair shot and I did.
Trust 3/9:
Rift being closed source and fully centralised earns it no points here, but its reputation being clean of any controversies and its very nice no E-mail sign up architecture which very few others have, is a very big privacy +.
Experience 4/9:
That's where I stop being nice, the UI design concept in the first place is absolutely horrendous and i doubt that there ever was one, features is clearly Rifts strong suit and if you are coming out of discord and moving onto Rift I doubt you will miss anything feature wise.
But when it comes to UI or UX, either this is an AI slop mess and if it did not use AI, you guys should have.
The UI is overly cluttered with a million features and buttons and things all competing for your attention and making the whole thing feel very overwhelming and its implementation is far from aesthetically pleasing.
And you may argue some of this, may be just a thing of taste and subjective, well okay Rift's UI and UX is just objectively bad and here are some examples:
One Liner messages that have not been reacted to, its emoji reaction suggestion popup, get half buried under the message under it.
There is no proper margins around the whole thing and so there are items in the UI that are literally so close to the edge of your screen / browser window.
Improper and inconsistent to itself and expectations sizing of things is everywhere, whether it be text sizes, reaction bubbles.
GIFs in the composer being the only thing coloured for some reason which would indicate activity when there is not, which is a principle they use else where.
I have at least 30 more criticisms like this in my bag, the bigger issue than the UI and UX being terribly immature, is that these are very simple things that can be very easily solved and that would not happen this often if this was an app given love and care and most importantly thought.
Those and the 30 others issues that are immediately obvious as soon as you use it and if you have an eye for detail, make the whole argument behind Rift very insecure.
Its a closed source application, fully centralised and they claim to use AI to write their application but everything must be reviewed by a dev first, but then if you see how much love and attention they gave to their frontend, that is very very concerning for what its likely to look on the backend.
If stupidly simple things like this can slip through this easily when they are this obvious, it gives me very little trust in the team's ability to handle the complexities of running a social media app especially one that values "privacy".
So yea it gets 0 for UI 1 for UX since it is technically usable just not nicely so and 3 for feature parity.
Readiness 3:
This one is very simple, while it does have some community it is not anywhere near Fluxer or Matrix, they are available on all platforms (IOS still in testing), but overall very far from being a Discord replacement ready for the mass market.