A Complete History of Stoat

In 2019 three students in their mid-teens – Paul Makles (Insert), Rene Vinter (Nizune), and Martin Löffler (FatalErrorCoded) – established Riot (stylised RIOT), an online chat platform targeting gaming communities. Funded by donations on Patreon, Riot operated at a small scale and ultimately ceased development in mid-2019. Riot landing page. Throughout 2020, the team worked on a new project: Revolt. Starting afresh with the lessons learned from Riot, rather than building upon it. Riot had been developed in ECMAScript, while Rust was chosen for Revolt’s back-end as a result of Makles wishing to use the opportunity to learn the language. The name ‘Revolt’ was originally just the name of the API server in development for the project, but it ended up sticking and becoming the name of the project as a whole. Work on Revolt began in late 2019 and continued through 2020. The back-end was established with a collection of services: January, for proxying images and generating embeds. Autumn, a…