Why Volt.im?

- All content is searchable by search engines (via forum mode), and is easily accessible without registering an account.

Why not Telegram?

- Phone number needed
- High RAM usage (up to 3GB+), especially with lots of channels and media
- No usernames (paid feature to register without a phone number)
- Doesn't work well with complex communities (channels, roles etc)
- Smartphone needed to create an account (ios/android), need an Android VM to create an account using a desktop computer
- Wastes storage (gigabytes used by old cached videos etc)
- Bad at code blocks
- Buggy heavy client (updates, photos/videos often not loading), although definitely not as heavy as the alternatives below
- The server is not open source
- The code of the official clients is not immediately released
- Stickers are hard to pick (mouse, short history, no text shortcuts like :pogchamp: etc)
- A very low quality of video calls, unreliable audio calls with delays (no p2p)
- Not federated

Why not Discord?

- The server is not open source
- The official client is not open source
- Very poor moderation tools: no way to select/delete multiple messages, no logging etc
- No way to move messages between channels (for example to move offtopic discussions to an appropriate channel)
- The installable desktop client does sketchy stuff with your computer data
- Bad towards third party clients
- All data belongs to Discord/data mining
- Very heavy, bloated, slow
- Bad spam protection by default, need to use third party bots which are often unreliable
- Not federated
- No secret chats
- Bad search: slow and not exact (can't search for a substring for example)

Why not Signal?

- Signal requires a phone number, this is not private and not safe
- Signal is openly against third party clients.
- The client is very heavy and weighs 600+ MB:

Why not Matrix?

- Hard to set up
- Lots of spam
- Bad performance
- Cannot be set up like a Discord server (no channels)