Hacker News Reader

Comment by hunvreus | Hacker News Reader

There are tons of free apps, with contenders like Kandan (https://github.com/kandanapp/kandan) if you're looking for a self-hosted or free alternative to HipChat/Campfire, you can even find sexy-ish Web clients for IRC (https://github.com/thedjpetersen/subway).

The problem I see with message apps is that it's like email; you really wished you could host it yourself and fine tune things (as well as make sure nobody is eavesdropping). But you can't have it down or (worse) performing at half capacity. It needs to be up all the time with almost perfect quality.

Sure you can set something up yourself, but you'll probably struggle with maintaining a decent QoS, and if your team is any good, they probably won't allow that to go on very long.

View on HN

Shameless plug, I've also written an app: https://github.com/sdelements/lets-chat

It looks a little something like this: http://i.imgur.com/djnd0Uk.png

It's still in it's infancy, currently working on a big update that includes a REST api and other stuff.

Why re-inventing the wheel? IRC and XMPP are proven technologies that scale, I wouldn't go and try to build my own messaging technology: there are hard problems like presence and notifications that you don't want to solve yourself.

I don't see how these are hard problems. We needed something simple, stateful and easy to work with so we rolled our own thing. It's only a few hundred lines of code and we've extended it to work with LDAP among other things.

...how is your [insert tech startup here] going to maintain a decent level of QoS if you cannot maintain it for a trio of IRCds and a trio node instances? You could even get away with DNS-only HA since it is purely internal so if A is down, everyone knows to connect to B or C.

The only reason I don't host my own e-mail is I haven't found an open source project that can truly compete with gmail's functionality and the fact I don't really care if Google reads my e-mail since none of it is sensitive.

I have high hopes for https://www.mailpile.is/ since if my Desktop is down, I'm screwed /anyway/.

Just my two cents.

It's not really a matter of ability, rather a matter of focus.

You sure can maintain your own IRC server, the same way you can maintain your own Git server. But it's probably a waste of time when you know that you have free or cheap alternatives (Gmail, GitHub, Mailchimp): stuff breaks, and even if you can fix it doesn't mean you should.

I outsource stuff that I depend on and don't want to waste time maintaining: email, online storage, some collaboration tools...

Fair enough. I guess I took the struggle + QoS comment and ran with that. :)

Fair enough; outsourcing is not always an option (or convenient). I actually find GitLab pretty compelling.

If you're into mailpile, you should support them for the Knight Foundation News Challenge: https://www.newschallenge.org/challenge/2014/feedback-review.... Personally, I assume that I wouldn't be able to do a better job at securing stuff up on my own, but it is an interesting project nonetheless.

And if you still have 5 minutes to kill, check out Carbon Folder, my team's entry: https://www.newschallenge.org/challenge/2014/submissions/car...

I maintain our internal GitLab instance so I definitely agree with that. :)

I'll take a look at yours, I already did the Mailpile bit.

And also sexy web frontends for existing IRC client WeeChat: http://cormier.github.io/glowing-bear/

Source: http://cormier.github.io/glowing-bear/

Worth noting that SingAlong (the OP), is also a contributor to Kandan - mentioned in their README

If you're working with IRC, your backend will also get DDOS'ed very quickly and very often. So there's that fun to deal with as well.

The IRC server I use at work is DDOS'd less than our website. ;)

+1 for Kandan's use of ClojureScript

Reply on news.ycombinator.com