Harmony: Chat like Discord. Federated like email
32 points by FinalDestiny 16 hours ago | 23 comments
  • AustinDev 14 hours 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.

  • Slow_Hand 14 hours 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_ 14 hours 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 12 hours ago |
      Matrix's decentralised rooms cause tons of problems in practice.
      • enemy777 11 hours ago |
        Could you name 1gram of the problems?
        • cowlevel 9 hours ago |
          "waiting to receive message" and it never gets received
          • Arathorn 6 hours 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.
            • vfosnar 3 hours ago |
              it still happens occasionally but i think its mostly something client side as sending a few more messages usually resolves it, thats still annoyin tho

              but yeah i agree this should have been Matrix i see no reason for it not to be, this is just causing unnecessary fragmentation

  • 2Gkashmiri 14 hours ago |
    I never understood discords use of "server" Maybe a community but why "server"?
    • unethical_ban 13 hours 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 13 hours 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 12 hours 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 8 hours 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?
        • cowlevel 12 hours ago |
          That's correct. Discord co-opted established terminology for its own ends and it was very successful.
        • voxic11 11 hours 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.
      • vfosnar 3 hours ago |
        i think it sorta comes from user slang, they call it, or at least used to call it "guilds" instead of servers
  • N8works 10 hours ago |
    I liked this idea when Google called it Wave. Lol
  • heavensteeth 9 hours 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.
  • Fizz43 8 hours 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.
    • y4my4my4m 5 hours ago |
      Someone linked this post on Harmony after asking why were there suddenly many new users joining. I'm the creator.

      It's not out of nowhere as I've been working on this since Jan of 2024. But I suppose it's only starting to gain traction recently.

      Thanks :)

  • CSSer 5 hours 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.
    • foxtrottbravo 5 hours ago |
      Two things I expect equally from most human maintained software
  • yayamo an hour ago |
    I find it kind of funny that this looks like it used the half-parody component library: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48445554

    call me tasteless but I also like it.