Since Discord announced they’re going to help Petie T collect selfies of us all I’ve been working on a self hosted alternative mostly for my mates. I had five goals in mind when I started this:
- Text Channels
- Voice channels
- Screen Sharing
- End to end encrypted DMs
- Able to run on pretty much any web hosting
I’ve reached that point now and figured why not slap the GPL on it and send it out into the wild.
I’m sure there’ll be lots of bugs and I don’t think it will scale well. I never set out to make something that would grow into a behemoth that’s used for customer support and all sorts of shit.
The goal was to make something that covers that trifecta of text/voice/screensharing, without relying on P2P connectivity, and able to do it well for small groups of people.
There are more features I have in mind if it gets any interest:
- Rate limiting on backend requests
- Quasar app with the ability to add more than one server (the frontend is already built in Quasar and I started writing some code for it but I’m mostly building this for myself + friends where I host my own instance so I’ve not given it much attention)
So yeah, I’m not a professional dev, this is a hobby for me. Would be cool to see if anyone manages to get it running.
Sensible, limiting scope and knowing your limits are wisdoms all too many lack. Having something that fills the text/sound/vidya needs and is easy to spin up will find uses, doesn’t need to do everything.
To the end of being easy to spin up, which is likely to attract other developers in time if that’s something you’d like, consider wrapping it up in a docker container. It’s not that hard, basically follow your own instructions in a special docker build format.
Thank you for your feedback.
Honestly, there are a few more features I want to add like markdown/gif support, image/video uploads and user settings (push to talk, volume leveling, etc. are sorely needed) but outside of that and cleaning up bits of the UI, I’m terrified of creating an unwieldy codebase. I don’t want something that requires constant tweaks and updates, just something that focuses on those core features and nails them down. You can just install it and pretty much forget about it.
Docker is definitely on my list, I was going to have a chat with one of my mates that lives in docker land to see if he could give me a hand setting it up properly. I’ve used docker before but mostly in hacky ways rather than something I’d be comfortable deploying to other people.
I’d be happy to contribute the docker stuff if you want as well. I do it for fun and profit, and I’m gonna be awake for the next three months straight with a newborn so I’d absolutely welcome the opportunity to do something other than feed this poor child.
Sounds good.