Harmony: Chat like Discord. Federated like email | Hacker News Reader

Harmony: Chat like Discord. Federated like email

mony.lol

36 pointsFinalDestiny28 comments

It's AGPL3 with additional terms, one of which is that all forks MUST publicly retain the phrase "Powered by Harmony" in the Web UI. Interesting decision, generally projects want to avoid forks claiming to be upstream.

> The Discord bridge mirrors channels, threads, replies and reactions both ways, so a community can try Harmony without splitting in two. Turn it off when everyone has moved, or never.

That's a very thoughtful feature. I admin a Discord server of 2,600 and while I like the idea of a federated server the cost of getting most people to jump ship to the new software gives me pause. This seems to directly address a large part of my hesitation.

Interesting, but it leaves me wondering - why ActivityPub, which IIRC is the Mastodon/Lemmy protocol, rather than, say, Matrix? Wouldn't a protocol designed for private messaging generally be preferable?

Matrix's decentralised rooms cause tons of problems in practice.

Could you name 1gram of the problems?

"waiting to receive message" and it never gets received

you really shouldn't be getting "unable to decrypt" or "waiting to receive message" problems in Matrix since ~Sept 2024. The only scenario is if you have logged out of all your devices (so the sender has no way to encrypt for you), or if network federation is so broken that messages are flowing indirectly by other servers.

it still happens occasionally but i think its mostly something client side as sending a few more messages usually resolves it, thats still annoyin tho

but yeah i agree this should have been Matrix i see no reason for it not to be, this is just causing unnecessary fragmentation

fwiw, i'm sure y4my4my4m has good reasons for not using Matrix (beyond unable-to-decrypt memes) - i'd be genuinely interested to know what they are. For instance, i'm wondering if this is more about wanting to avoid being constrained by using an open standard, and instead being able to freestyle rapidly on top of activitypub? After all, it's much easier to go fast if you don't have to interop with anything else. Or consciously wanting to simplify the E2EE? Or having had a bad experience with Matrix server performance/complexity in the past?

"shouldn't" is secondary to what actually happens in the real world.

I use an account on a matrix server other than the default matrix.org. My password manager won't fill it in so I have to type this server into the login form manually every time I login.

I never understood discords use of "server" Maybe a community but why "server"?

For people who were used to Ventrilo and mumble and teamspeak, the concept of "server" is well understood and Discord is essentially a voice/chat server as a service with unified identity.

But in those cases people actually hosted a server, right?

In discord it's more like a slack workspace, right?

The people "hosting" a discord "server" are not actually running hardware anywhere that runs the server?

98% of the people hosting "servers" of any kind in the world are not actually running hardware, everything is timesharing compute on a hyperscaler's computer now.

But yes, a Discord server is equivalent to a Slack workspace. It's just inherited terminology.

My understanding is a lot of residential isps would be angry at you for running servers of a substantial size out of your house anyways?

That's correct. Discord co-opted established terminology for its own ends and it was very successful.

For what it's worth I never actually hosted a ventrilo server either, I always just paid a service to do it. Pretty much the same experience as discord is today.

Correct, they are not hosting. It's a service. Still, an admin of a Discord "server" has complete control over the server - access, permissions, roles, etc.

i think it sorta comes from user slang, they call it, or at least used to call it "guilds" instead of servers

When they were a gaming oriented platform they were called Guilds. They still are in the API. https://docs.discord.com/developers/resources/guild

I find it kind of funny that this looks like it used the half-parody component library: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48445554

call me tasteless but I also like it.

Damn this has a ton of features. How does something like this come out of nowhere? No idea how i've never seen or heard of this before.

Someone linked this post on Harmony after asking why were there suddenly many new users joining. I'm the creator.

It's not out of nowhere as I've been working on this since Jan of 2024. But I suppose it's only starting to gain traction recently.

Thanks :)

Glad to see this project.

So much great info about software projects, game communities and much more that would have been on forums just a decade or so ago is now locked in discord/x/facebook/etc forever and will be lost to time. It's a form a cancer on the open internet but, what isn't now adays.

This looks like slop. Why? Supabase architecture for a non-trivial service and obvious Claude-speak in the docs. It reads a lot like a real idea processed through an LLM. I expect bugs and reduced reliability.

Two things I expect equally from most human maintained software

I liked this idea when Google called it Wave. Lol

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