HN

Comments (45)

• bratsche
  The website says it's released under a permissive open source license, but it doesn't say what that license is. And when you look at the GitHub repo[1] there is no LICENSE file and no mention of license.[1]. https://github.com/StrafeChat/web.strafe.chat
• bob1029
  Cloning discord is easy. Convincing everyone in a particular circle to move to a new solution is the challenge. You have to force a partition in the social network unless everyone in your group is happy to run both applications side by side (they won't be).I was there when teamspeak was forced out by the demands of the group. There was no fighting it. My individual ideological preferences cannot defeat those of a collective. These people just want to play games. They don't want to take up arms in my weird nerd battle against COTS software, closed platforms or buggy applications.
• Bender
  Is anyone tracking all these open source Discord clones? I ask because I have seen about a dozen of them advertised by Youtube influencers. New chat clients seem to be showing up almost daily. I think it would be interesting to have a table that shows features, OS/phone support, E2EE, federation, scale how many clients per server per resources, etc...As bob1029 said, making apps is easy especially now but getting friend groups to move is the real challenge so I think a column in the table should include a score for how easy it is to import Discord server history, chat history, invite friends and so on. I think there would have to be next to no friction or risks. If self hosted then backups would have to be encrypted and automated so that the servers can be treated as mostly ephemeral. Operating and maintaining Discord takes a rather large team so these open source alternatives would have to be able to show they have automated most tasks in a secure and fault tolerant manor that is hard to get wrong.
• tptacek
  Why would you use Olm/Megolm for your chat protocol? Even Matrix doesn't want to be using it anymore (they're in theory planning a transition to IETF MLS, last I checked). Group E2E is incredibly hard to get right, not just because of the underlying cryptographic constructions, but because all the metadata and signaling that rides on top of and alongside the group encrypted messaging layer also influences key distribution.If you're literally just doing a front end to Matrix, I get why you have to use the current Matrix protocol. But if you're doing something that isn't Matrix, you should avoid Olm.
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  Stitch4223
  Previous alternatives for discord never included video, so they were no alternatives. So: great to see this!Nitpick: the bottom row on the front page shows a discord link, but not their own strafe link. I hope they can add this because of dogfooding.
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  NikxDa
  I also want to highlight Chatto here: https://chatto.run/ Very lightweight and self-hostable. Not e2ee, though.
• hk1337
  https://github.com/StrafeChatThere’s a GitHub but it was all the way at the bottom of the page behind a tiny icon in a group of other socials. At least on mobile it was.
• jeromechoo
  Another Discord alternative that still lacks an iOS app. I personally don’t mind but if I am to switch my entire friend group to an alternative, native apps on mobile is a fundamental requirement.
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  import
  Links to docs, resources, GitHub is non existent. Also no screenshots. Waste of time.
• themaninthedark
  Great project, glad to see something like this!Also all links under the resources heading are broken.
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  fuckff
  Claims to be done right, vibecoded bs from last week that can't even get the links on their page right, who cares
• pampas
  No reaction emojis?
• anon
  undefined
• sharebeam
  [flagged]
• popalchemist
  [dead]
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  lynx97
  Means "punishment" in german, weird name.
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  TZubiri
  Horrible idea, Discord is an app for videogames, which means it's an app for kids.E2E is just not appropriate for handling childrens' messaging.
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  VoidWhisperer
  Not to claim that Discord has like copyright over their layout, but do you not anticipate eventually running into problems with them due to using pretty much the same layout/visuals verbatim? It is to the point where one could easily be visually mistaken for the other unless a much closer look is takenIncase anyone is wondering, there is a screenshot here: https://github.com/StrafeChat