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.
Yet Another Discord Alternative would be a better name than Harmony.
Has the problem of having Discord in the name. Also Harmony is pretty much opposite of Discord. Good name.
I’d you just call it YADA without it being an acronym…
That’s true, maybe “Yet Another Discourse Alternative”? Discussion Alternative? I just like the idea of a chat platform whose acronym is YADA.
Discourse is already a platform, too 😅
YADA is a funny acronym though.
It was originally going to be Entropy (there might actually still be references to that in the code) but 3 seconds in Google turned up a decentralised messaging app called that so went with a name change. Now it just sounds like an early internet dating site.
Also a failed cryptocurrency.
A little bit, but it’s probably okay. Hope it takes off!
They could’ve shortened it to YADA YADA.
I thought the same right after I posted. Damnit. :(
IME, code projects either die or live long enough that you think of a better name for them long after a name change becomes not worth the effort. Naming things is hard 🤷♂️
Meanwhile the people over at Element:
No for real love this name, just call it YADA, though you might get a cease and desist from seinfield.
At work one of our application names is “just another generator of…” and we just call it jag
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