Since Discord announced they’re going to help Petie T collect selfies of us all I’ve been working on a self hosted alternative mostly for my mates. I had five goals in mind when I started this:
- Text Channels
- Voice channels
- Screen Sharing
- End to end encrypted DMs
- Able to run on pretty much any web hosting
I’ve reached that point now and figured why not slap the GPL on it and send it out into the wild.
I’m sure there’ll be lots of bugs and I don’t think it will scale well. I never set out to make something that would grow into a behemoth that’s used for customer support and all sorts of shit.
The goal was to make something that covers that trifecta of text/voice/screensharing, without relying on P2P connectivity, and able to do it well for small groups of people.
There are more features I have in mind if it gets any interest:
- Rate limiting on backend requests
- Quasar app with the ability to add more than one server (the frontend is already built in Quasar and I started writing some code for it but I’m mostly building this for myself + friends where I host my own instance so I’ve not given it much attention)
So yeah, I’m not a professional dev, this is a hobby for me. Would be cool to see if anyone manages to get it running.
Heh, I’ve been around a while. I expect people to pick it apart so they can get that kick out of being right or whatever.
It does what I need, thought other people might have found a use for it. I’m always happy for constructive criticism on my code or feature suggestions but people crying because I used Claude to give me a template for the readme can kick stones.
I’m sort of reluctant to add bridging mechanics for a couple of reasons. I don’t think my coding ability is up to it and it’s not something I’m really interested in or a goal for the project. I set out to make something that can be spun up pretty quickly for a group of people to have voice/text/screenshare when gaming. I never intended for it to be federated or hook into all sorts of services, just a self contained service for mostly private comms that doesn’t report back all your activity to Palantir or advertisers.
And this is exactly what I want, something easy to deploy and host for a small group of friends. It doesn’t need to scale infinitely or federate.
Sensible, limiting scope and knowing your limits are wisdoms all too many lack. Having something that fills the text/sound/vidya needs and is easy to spin up will find uses, doesn’t need to do everything.
To the end of being easy to spin up, which is likely to attract other developers in time if that’s something you’d like, consider wrapping it up in a docker container. It’s not that hard, basically follow your own instructions in a special docker build format.
Thank you for your feedback.
Honestly, there are a few more features I want to add like markdown/gif support, image/video uploads and user settings (push to talk, volume leveling, etc. are sorely needed) but outside of that and cleaning up bits of the UI, I’m terrified of creating an unwieldy codebase. I don’t want something that requires constant tweaks and updates, just something that focuses on those core features and nails them down. You can just install it and pretty much forget about it.
Docker is definitely on my list, I was going to have a chat with one of my mates that lives in docker land to see if he could give me a hand setting it up properly. I’ve used docker before but mostly in hacky ways rather than something I’d be comfortable deploying to other people.
My only hope is that you include one weird nonstandard Markdown feature so you can come up with a name for your yet-another-almost-markdown-but-not-quite-standard-markdown version. Just because. :)
I’d be happy to contribute the docker stuff if you want as well. I do it for fun and profit, and I’m gonna be awake for the next three months straight with a newborn so I’d absolutely welcome the opportunity to do something other than feed this poor child.
Sounds good.
This blasé attitude towards legitimate genAI concerns is only further concerning to me. Like the name and like the goal, but I don’t think I’ll be using it or contributing. Best of luck.
Appreciate the feedback, but if I’m going to be quoted, also me:
Let’s call a spade a spade here. It was not a legitimate GenAI concern. I considered rebasing the repo after I realised my mistake but I honestly thought no one would care, or the people that would care enough to look at commit histories would know enough about what they are looking at to realise what I did.
What OP did was look at the commit history, not understand it and then accuse me of being AI. So no, that is not in good faith.
I think there was a miscommunication and that after all I’ve seen, funnily enough, you seem more concerned than the original commenter about “being right or whatever”.
And you also did admit that you used genAI for some aspects, so the original commenter was not completely wrong. Some of us do not only care about the code.
There is a reason I am concerned about “being right”. This is a project I’ve worked pretty much non stop on for about a month, have written every piece of code myself. This is a public forum and the first time I’ve put my repo out there. To have the very first response be a dismissal that the literal hundreds of hours I’ve put it into it is just AI is not only insulting, it also makes it difficult for me to get valid feedback as people won’t read past that first comment and actually look at what I’ve made.
Sorry but I won’t roll over and take it when my hard work is dismissed because I used AI to generate the GitHub readme template. That is absurd.
I understand that you’re emotionally invested in it, and I respect and sympathize with that. But when you’re putting yourself and your work out there to the public, that’s kinda the deal you’re agreeing to. Not everyone’s going to like it.
You call it absurd, but genAI is an extremely important issue to a lot of people. I would recommend you just not engage with people if you cannot emotionally handle it.
This is incredibly condescending.
The OP has put hard work into something and has shared it with other people out of the goodness of their heart.
You’re out here trying to bait them into an emotional reaction and when they defend themself far more eloquently than you criticised them you call them emotional.
I found the initial bit from OP that I quoted to be condescending, personally, which is why I spoke up in the first place. But we can all agree to disagree, and hope the project gives people who want it exactly what they want.
Defending my work in a public setting is not being unable to emotionally handle criticism. Framing it that way is disingenuous but I think you know that and just want to push your anti AI agenda.
Sorry, you can call me emotionally unstable all you want but if you think generating the template for the GitHub readme (not even the install instructions or anything, just the template) and some favicons invalidates hundreds of hours of work then it’s you that needs to do some reflection.
You’re putting a lot of words in my mouth that I did not say. I wished you good luck, and still mean it, for the record.