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Comment by jen729w | Hacker News Reader

> everyone would be better served by open platforms

Oh cool, which ones?!

…aaaand there's the problem.

This suggests that the immediate availability of a drop-in replacement today means there is no utility in encouraging that growth.

There are multiple open-source tools that do everything Discord does. There are few-to-none that offer everything Discord does, and certainly none that are centralized, network-effect-capture-ready.

Short term:

* Small group chats with known friends: Signal, whatsapp, IRC, Matrix

* Community chat: Zulip, Rocket.chat

* Community voice: Mumble, Teamspeak

* Video / screen sharing and voice chat: Zoom, BigBlueButton, Jitsi

I've heard about Stoat but haven't read up on it.

None of those play in the same league as discord for hosting a community, and none of them look in a position to be there in the foreseeable future. It sucks but that's how it is.

This is how it always is, until suddenly one day it isn't. Linux didn't play in the same league as serious and commercial UNIX systems until one fateful day it killed them all dead forever.

> until suddenly one day it isn't

Thread OP here. This is exactly my point: today isn't that day. I need it to be.

Some future server that I can migrate my community to isn't useful.

That was true for the Twitter alternatives too, and look how fast they grew.

If you want to host your own stoat server, you will also need to recompile the apps to use your URL and distribute them to your friends, and they will not be compatible for any other server.

Yes, I learned in the Zulip promo discussion earlier this week that self-hosted push notification servers have to have certs compiled directly into the app. I can't tell if it's malice, indifference or incompetence to have that design; any answer is completely believable.

Is there an architectural opportunity to build a "Self-hosted push notification" app and business, where the push broker builds an app to deploy to play, then the self-hosted apps build trust with the broker. The broker app sends push notifications to the user device, which can inform them of the message sent and open arbitrary app windows?

This topic comes up with firebase avoidance on degoogled phones. Have a look at unifiedpush.org and ntfy.sh

There's an implementation sample here: https://fluffy.chat/en/faq/#push_without_google_services

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