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Comment by bruceb | Hacker News Reader

Here is some straight forward feedback and advice. There is no compelling reason to use your chat as of now. Look at the first 3 things you talk about. Private. Anyone can setup a private group already an dozens of msging apps. Real Networks. Same as first, can already be done. Topic oriented. So channels?

You might be a skilled dev, but you still have to make something that is either better than what exist or different.

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Thanks for the feedback. I guess my issue is, as a user of slack, discord, twitter, WhatsApp and other chat products, they have never really solved my community problems. Discord is a largely public gamer platform that is now being used for other things. Twitter is a public broadcast network. Slack is for work. WhatsApp is private but single channel groups and owned by Facebook. I'm not trying to build for the sake of building. I just honestly can't find a place to build small private communities in a sane way. I want to add events and todos and a few other things. Think of it like private Facebook groups. I also want to try build something managed by a small collective of engineers who want to pull their data off these public platforms.

I appreciate the comments though.

"I just honestly can't find a place to build small private communities in a sane way."

Signal does exactly this and I've used it to build a small private community of people who listen to my podcast. It's wonderful.

Signal isn't a great option for general community group chat if you primarily use it for immediate (urgent) texting, though. It breaks down especially when you add global connections in different time zones.

We are a small group with a discord "server" - and that works for us because most of us doesn't use discord for anything else - and i can comfortably have only notifications for dm/mentions and otherwise read it async at my leisure.

Granted discord has a gazillion knobs to tune notifications - but i could never make it work reasonably for diverse use cases like "wake me up in the night if family tries to reach me" and "never nag me about game updates - that I'll strictly check manually".

This would replace WhatsApp for me, but what’s to stop you turning into another Facebook?

I don't really want to build another megacorp. I've done the VC funded route and played the ambition dream chasing game. It's not for me. If anything, the mission is to be the anti-facebook. To build something community led and community owned. I don't think we have enough of those things. It basically comes down to, who do you trust. I trust me, and hopefully you'll come to trust me too.

What do you mean by "build small private communities"?

Is it not the case that when you're hanging out with some people, someone asks "hey man what's your facebook/number/discord" and then you get added to the group chat on whatever platform?

I have been assuming that reddit (and thus redit clone software) is 'find a place to build small private communities in a sane way. " - admittedly I have not used it, so it's just assumption.

I can say from experience that wordpress+buddypress handles multiple private / public / partial each / optional for each group and profile.. all these things right out of the box, free, and WP is installable via softalicious on basic shared hosting environments.. as well as one click installs at places like DO I believe..

I like your calling to build more private group options, it's something I have hobbied with for more than a decade.

I think ultimately the roads for this end on paid instances that have an easy method for not just deploying - but migrating to other servers and moving domains and such as well - there becomes this push pull from edge cases of speech that will make the need to split and move the groups.

editing to add deeper dive into similar things in another thread popping today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36141083

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