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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

But the point here is that you don't want the network effects. You want a chat server for people you know and explicitly invite, for a specific purpose, under your control. Maybe you want the data to never leave your colocated box and your VPN, and your server to have no public presence at all.

There are things that Slack cannot easily offer.

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You want the open protocol to have network effects, not a proprietary company's product.

Email worked out pretty well, while IRC failed for reasons that are probably correctable.

Open protocols are great. The software in question is OSS.

But this software is not for expanding the audience, it's for limiting it, and their exposure. Much like Tailscale is not for extending your network with more nodes that can freely join, but for limiting it to a private subset you trust.

This project looks great and I wish them luck. I'm just lamenting the fact that we still haven't solved the really big problem with Slack-like chat apps.

The Tailscale analogy isn't quite right because there are no real network effects involved. Most of Tailscale's utility exists even if no one else uses it.

Slack is only useful if your friends, coworkers, or partners use it. Same with Discord, and even open source alternatives for the most part.

No, you do want the network effects. Nobody wants to install yet another special snowflake chat client for a single community. Unless they are being forced to (like in a work environment) or are getting significant benefits out of joining that community, most people would just prefer not joining at all over installing an additional client.

Discord is winning because it's a dozen different communities in one single convenient client. Want your new chat platform to win? Convince all those communities to switch.

Isn't this irc?

Just need a client app to make it look like something else.

Like slack did.

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