I think we can all agree coming up with names is not one of my key skills. Not following standards, however, is. Hold my beer, I got this.

It’s a new project that I’ve been working on locally. My code backups are handled locally (this is /c/selfhosted right?) so I’ve not had a reason to commit anything to GitHub until I was ready to let other people have a crack at it.

My Github account is 14 years old and has previous projects on it with 40+ stars. I have been actively replying as much as I can in this thread and the project is entirely open source, feel free to review the code and let me know if you find anything suspicious in there.

Thanks for sharing, that’s an interesting read. I hadn’t come across this when I was looking (to be fair, it might have been posted after I looked, I’ve been mostly on stack overflow for a month).

I’m in agreement with many of the author’s points (I’ve ticked all of their requirements except markdown support and the only stretch requirement I don’t meet is being able to scale up to thousands of users - but I never wanted to do that anyway).

I am really torn on “everything needs to be federated” though. I feel like credential fatigue/ease of joining a server is largely solved with SSO/SAML or magic links with guest access. I want to love federation, I really do… But my own lived in experience with matrix has soured me on it. It was a pain to maintain and the eventual tipping point was one of my “trusted” federated services (Arch btw) flooding me with CSAM.

I think there are many discord users that use it for voice/text/screen share with a core group and don’t really care about all the extra stuff or having these huge servers filled with people they’ll never interact with. It’s just the only realistic option right now to chat with their friends. Those are the people I’m hoping to attract. I’m not saying what I’m offering is a perfect solution but what I am offering is that core functionality without the gradual enshittification and constant slurping of your data.

I’m with you, I love Matrix as a concept but the experience of actually running it was a major headache for me.

I’d love to contribute to those projects but anyone that’s read through my repo for this will see I’m not that good. It took me a long ass time to figure out end to end encryption and those projects are built on it. 😅

I also feel like they fit a different niche, at least matrix does, I’m not too familiar with XMPP. I’ve said in other replies, I’m not looking to make something that’s infinitely scalable or federates with other services, just a relatively simple chat app that someone can have running for their group of gamer friends. If it can do text/voice/screen share with minimal setup/fuss/external dependencies then I’m a happy boy. I kinda had this idea in my head that I’d like to get it to the point where you can upload a tar.gz to cheapo web hosting, untar, follow the setup wizard and have comms ready to go without having to mess around in config files and what not.

This will probably be the first update I release. I’ve pre emptively built the front end in Quasar and there’s even some bits of commented out code in there from where I started looking at storing authentication data per server. The plan as I see it, and I think this makes sense, is to have the web app based front-end be for people that want to run their own contained instance of both the API and front-end but then also have a Quasar desktop based app that has server switching built in. This then allows the server owner to just run the API if they want and let the user worry about how they connect.

It hasn’t been a priority for me at the moment because I’m literally the only person running a server. 😅

Now that it’s out in the wild, my next focus will be on the multi server side of things and making the text channels a bit more functional than just plaintext.

So the group channels and audio/voice aren’t but DMs are. It uses asymmetric signing and per conversation keys. These can be imported/exported so you can see your conversations across devices but by default the keys are never transmitted.

Unless there’s an issue with my code I’m missing?

Edit: oh wait, this was a reply about fluxer, I’ll leave it up just for info in case anyone is interested. Can you tell this is day one using Lemmy… 🫠

Defending my work in a public setting is not being unable to emotionally handle criticism. Framing it that way is disingenuous but I think you know that and just want to push your anti AI agenda.

Sorry, you can call me emotionally unstable all you want but if you think generating the template for the GitHub readme (not even the install instructions or anything, just the template) and some favicons invalidates hundreds of hours of work then it’s you that needs to do some reflection.

There is a reason I am concerned about “being right”. This is a project I’ve worked pretty much non stop on for about a month, have written every piece of code myself. This is a public forum and the first time I’ve put my repo out there. To have the very first response be a dismissal that the literal hundreds of hours I’ve put it into it is just AI is not only insulting, it also makes it difficult for me to get valid feedback as people won’t read past that first comment and actually look at what I’ve made.

Sorry but I won’t roll over and take it when my hard work is dismissed because I used AI to generate the GitHub readme template. That is absurd.

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.

Appreciate the feedback, but if I’m going to be quoted, also me:

The actual meat and bones of the project, the code, is all written by me, a real human.

Let’s call a spade a spade here. It was not a legitimate GenAI concern. I considered rebasing the repo after I realised my mistake but I honestly thought no one would care, or the people that would care enough to look at commit histories would know enough about what they are looking at to realise what I did.

What OP did was look at the commit history, not understand it and then accuse me of being AI. So no, that is not in good faith.

Thank you so much. I’ve run through the setup so many times and got a few instances of it running but I also understand how it’s all working under the hood so I have a home field advantage. It would be a massive help to have someone go through the setup and make sure it’s actually doable by someone that didn’t make the thing because I’m so paranoid I’ve missed something in the instructions and it just simply doesn’t work.

The poll rate on the audio is pretty aggressive, will be interesting to see what happens if your requests take longer than the poll rate of sending/receiving audio. I’ve accounted for packets arriving out of order so should be okay but… We’ll see. 👀

Heh, I’ve been around a while. I expect people to pick it apart so they can get that kick out of being right or whatever.

It does what I need, thought other people might have found a use for it. I’m always happy for constructive criticism on my code or feature suggestions but people crying because I used Claude to give me a template for the readme can kick stones.

I’m sort of reluctant to add bridging mechanics for a couple of reasons. I don’t think my coding ability is up to it and it’s not something I’m really interested in or a goal for the project. I set out to make something that can be spun up pretty quickly for a group of people to have voice/text/screenshare when gaming. I never intended for it to be federated or hook into all sorts of services, just a self contained service for mostly private comms that doesn’t report back all your activity to Palantir or advertisers.

It was originally going to be Entropy (there might actually still be references to that in the code) but 3 seconds in Google turned up a decentralised messaging app called that so went with a name change. Now it just sounds like an early internet dating site.

I ran synapse for about a year with a STUN server so I could have voice/video and it was painful to set up and painful every time an update came around.

When discord started doing the ID verification thing I looked at alternatives and it seemed to be mumble, Teamspeak and matrix/synapse as the top contenders. None of them quite did the three text/voice/screen share though. Mumble is good at text/voice. Teamspeak 3 does the full package but screen share doesn’t work in Linux and requires additional setup/P2P, you also need an account with them so they will eventually go down the same route as discord. Matrix/synapse can do all three but as mentioned, it’s a nightmare.

As for why I’d create my own instead of forking an existing project: I just wanted to, it’s that simple. I don’t think I have the skillset to contribute to major projects, most of my code would get rejected. If I make my own, doesn’t matter. If people use it, great, if not, I’m not too bothered. I’ll probably end up pulling the whole repo down though if I keep getting called AI, that’s fucking infuriating.

I thought the same right after I posted. Damnit. :(

Like I said, I’m not a professional dev, this is a hobby. I fucked up my initial commit and included all the source for the Vue framework. That was me fixing my mistake. You’ll find a few more of those in there. If you actually look at the commit instead of just knee jerking you can see for yourself what happened.

To be honest, I’ve run matrix, it’s an absolute headache and to get voice and video is even worse. I don’t really care about federation, I’ve been pretty clear in what this project is.

I used Claude to give me a template for GitHub and generate the logo/favicon because I suck at all things creative. It’s open source, if someone wants to make me some images and rewrite the readme then crack on. The actual meat and bones of the project, the code, is all written by me, a real human.

Yes, I have run this myself, it works quite well. Apologies for trying to be a bit candid.

Appreciate the feedback.