Harmony: Chat like Discord. Federated like email

(mony.lol)

27 points | by FinalDestiny 11 hours ago ago

18 comments

  • heavensteeth 3 hours ago ago

    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.

  • CSSer 11 minutes ago ago

    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.

  • Fizz43 2 hours ago ago

    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.

  • Slow_Hand 9 hours ago ago

    > 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.

  • sparky_ 8 hours ago ago

    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?

    • cowlevel 7 hours ago ago

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

      • enemy777 6 hours ago ago

        Could you name 1gram of the problems?

        • cowlevel 4 hours ago ago

          "waiting to receive message" and it never gets received

          • Arathorn 26 minutes ago ago

            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.

  • 2Gkashmiri 8 hours ago ago

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

    • unethical_ban 8 hours ago ago

      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.

      • SahAssar 7 hours ago ago

        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?

        • anonymous908213 7 hours ago ago

          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.

          • bluefirebrand 3 hours ago ago

            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?

        • voxic11 6 hours ago ago

          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.

        • cowlevel 7 hours ago ago

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

  • AustinDev 9 hours ago ago

    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.

  • N8works 5 hours ago ago

    I liked this idea when Google called it Wave. Lol