[HN Gopher] Fosscord is a free open-source discord compatible ch...
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Fosscord is a free open-source discord compatible chat, voice and
video platform
Author : thunderbong
Score : 160 points
Date : 2021-10-11 17:20 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| rcthompson wrote:
| They're gonna get in trouble for that logo if this gets any
| significant amount of attention.
| rnd0 wrote:
| That was my first thought too.
| intevel wrote:
| We are working on that. ^Intevel
| antisthenes wrote:
| Why not just pick any one of free SVG icons available
| temporarily until you're ready to pick a logo?
| edoceo wrote:
| NounProject has one(thousand) and they have compatible
| licensing
| 3np wrote:
| Have you considered using Jitsi for video?
|
| What went for/against?
| dlsa wrote:
| Open-source client for a closed-source commercial offering. Could
| we perhaps now have a open-source server in future as well? _oh
| wait! There it is!_ Nicely done.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| This is likely to run into the same problem Gaim did before it
| changed to Pidgin. Or Lindows...
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I agree. In the US, trademark dilution needs to be defended
| against in order to secure the defense of the trademark in the
| future.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| I'm shallow, I need screenshots before I try a GUI
| all2 wrote:
| Very much this.
|
| When something UI/UX pops up on HN I always look for
| screenshots or GIFs showing core interactions. If there aren't
| any, I move on. I don't have the time/energy to install,
| inspect, etc.
|
| Basically I'm as shallow as folks swiping on Tinder. Show me a
| pretty UI/UX and I'll be all over it.
| Fnoord wrote:
| Probably against ToS, so can get your account banned (happened to
| sixcord dev).
|
| It does follow a client/server model so your server asks like a
| proxy/BNC while your client(s) connect(s) to your server.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Luckily, this doesn't matter if you create an entirely new
| community, because then you won't need the discord interop.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Now we just need distributed crypto identity (open source
| keybase) so you can maintain identity across platforms, with
| the ability to transparently sign and verify messages
| regardless of where they're persisted. This would allow for
| message logs to be ETLd while timestamps and provenance is
| maintained.
| all2 wrote:
| Can we do this with Mastadon or the Matrix comms standard?
|
| I have no clue how federated ID would work. Maybe some
| interop with PGP?
| ben0x539 wrote:
| I don't even want to maintain identity across Discord
| servers, I certainly don't want to automatically-verifiably
| maintain identity across completely separate platforms. :(
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I'm by no means suggesting it be mandatory, only
| available for those who do want to maintain their
| identity across disparate systems.
|
| If you want to be $random_uuid, that's fine too.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Hmm, if we could somehow point Ripcord towards a self-hosted
| Discord compatible instance, I'd be quite interested.
| infinitezest wrote:
| The demo site even says "Discord"...
| https://dev.fosscord.com/login
| goda90 wrote:
| Does Discord have open APIs that this can be built around, or
| will this be a callback to the IM wars when competitors kept
| shifting things to break compatibility across platforms?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Discord has a bot API but using any unofficial client ("self
| bots") can get your account banned. The Discord Matrix bridge
| warns about this, saying that attempts to use the friend
| request API from a bit will probably get your account
| permabanned (and the feature isn't active by default AFAIK).
|
| Discord doesn't seem to go after unofficial clients as much as
| they could, but if this client becomes popular they'll probably
| go after them.
| T-A wrote:
| https://discord.com/developers/docs/reference
| jchw wrote:
| While this is largely identical to the API used in the
| client, using the API against user accounts (as opposed to
| bot accounts) is called self-botting and is prohibited. Usage
| of third party clients can get you banned, and unfortunately
| this has already happened at times.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _using the API against user accounts (as opposed to bot
| accounts) is called self-botting and is prohibited_
|
| Gotta love how they reframe the conversation about user's
| rights. It's like how car companies of old redefined[0]
| walking as "jaywalking", reframing the conversations about
| street space in a way where the car became more important
| than the pedestrian.
|
| What they call "self-botting" is arguably the whole point
| of having general-purpose computers available to general
| population. Bicycles for the mind and all.
|
| --
|
| [0] - Allegedly; it's a factoid I saw repeated on HN. But
| even if not true, this doesn't affect my point.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| They're doing exactly what Twitter and Instagram do. They
| don't like people using their own automation because the
| companies either offer automation products themselves, or
| they have lucrative partnerships with companies that have
| exclusive API access to their platforms, who then go on
| to sell automation capabilities to users.
|
| There's no technical reason users can't automate how they
| use the services, and the security angle is an
| afterthought. The reason user automation is banned is
| because it might impact these companies' revenue streams.
| meibo wrote:
| Well, it's a private company and it's their
| infrastructure, their systems and their service. We all
| may dislike the practice but they have the right to enact
| their ToS, as long as they act legally in regards to
| payments, etc.
|
| Discord is seeing a huge spam/bot epidemic with stolen
| accounts right now, makes sense that they want to get on
| top of something like that.
| jchw wrote:
| To be fair, I think that a large part of trying to
| control automated access to Discord is genuinely in the
| user's interests: a common reason to use the API under
| the radar would be to mitigate privacy protections, anti-
| SPAM, bot oversight, etc.
|
| On the other hand, Discord has drawn some ire for their
| behavior. Third party clients are obviously not malicious
| or abusive, they are simply unauthorized. Tools that
| allow bulk deletion of messages are also very much not
| really abusive, though they may consume a lot of server
| resources if the architecture is poorly optimized for
| this use case. Yet these are probably the main legitimate
| use cases for so-called self-botting, and while many
| users have not been banned for it, many report having
| been banned for it. I have used both without issue, as
| well as done some manual self-botting, so I can only
| guess it is not really intentional to kick off legitimate
| users.
|
| There is a long and well-written discussion from the
| former developer of discord-py regarding their feelings:
| https://gist.github.com/Rapptz/4a2f62751b9600a31a0d3c7810
| 028...
|
| Personally, I did not mean to convey any particular
| feelings to the legitimacy or morality of Discord's
| stance, just to provide what I knew in a relatively
| neutral fashion. That having been said, while I find
| Discord to be relatively inoffensive, I am getting a bit
| bothered by the recent rebrands and crackdowns, and I
| sincerely long for a federated open-standard IM that
| works like email. But, I know lacking a good product,
| with good UX and some decent mechanism to handle abuse,
| it is a pretty asymmetric battle against IM clients with
| huge network effect advantages. And with email, you can
| see some cracks in its openness, as a direct result of
| trying to deal with abuse...
| rnd0 wrote:
| Neither the client nor the server are what makes discord however.
|
| What makes discord is the community around it, and the fact that
| 3rd party sites have decided to support it.
|
| Also there's the legal (important for edus, etc) and other
| support from the Discord people themselves.
|
| Gamers aren't going to leave what they already have -why would
| they? Edus sure as heck won't -who does that leave, a couple of
| hackers? Maybe?
|
| A better approach would have been to:
|
| a)Not use Discord's logo in your README.Md FFS
|
| b)Build up infrastructure similar to and competitive with
| Discord's but FOSS oriented
|
| c)THEN after b is accomplished, work on a client and a server.
|
| Like the many reddit clones that have come and gone (and the
| slashdot clones before them) this will be a mouse fart into a
| hurricane
| peanut_worm wrote:
| Did you look at the link? It is compatible with Discord.
| ironmagma wrote:
| > What makes discord is the community around it, and the fact
| that 3rd party sites have decided to support it.
|
| For FOSS projects, that really isn't a factor. The main thing
| is that Discord is a freely available channel that supports
| modern things like link previews, image uploads, voice chat,
| and persistent history. Slack does all these things but makes
| it a royal pain to join a new Slack.
|
| Why does it matter if gamers come or go? They're a totally
| different audience. This isn't about building the next social
| platform, it's about escaping control of the existing ones.
| circularfoyers wrote:
| To some extent what you're suggesting is what
| https://revolt.chat is already attempting.
| ironmagma wrote:
| Revolt is a nice product but as far as I'm aware they don't
| enable self-hosting or decentralized. It's just one big
| hosted hub, right?
| DoctorOW wrote:
| Not familiar but they seem to allow self hosting[1], as
| well as both the frontend[2] and backend[3] is open.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted
|
| [2]: https://github.com/revoltchat/revite
|
| [3]: https://github.com/revoltchat/delta
| [deleted]
| unethical_ban wrote:
| You are partially correct. Community and network effects are
| strong, but Discord has technical features no FOSS equivalent
| currently has:
|
| * One-click audio-video screensharing
|
| * One-click video conference and chatting
|
| * Emojis and inline images
|
| * Decent UI
|
| Bonus: Discord gives people the super quick option to have a
| hosted private server.
|
| Discord can do all this because you are the product. Sure,
| there is nitro, but Discord is spyware that looks at every
| process on your computer and I'm sure they are using/selling
| that data.
|
| So I believe that a client/server architecture that can do
| self-hosting and meet those technical requirements, could
| possibly bolt-on "single identity" ala Discord.
|
| Does Matrix support instant screenshare/video chat rooms?
| mr_johnson22 wrote:
| Matrix doesn't (yet), but Jitsi does, even without accounts
| for joined users. All you need to start a Jitsi chat with any
| number of people is a URL.
|
| _Integration_ with Jitsi is a separate matter, however.
| Hosting it can be a pain too.
| yosito wrote:
| > Discord is spyware that looks at every process on your
| computer and I'm sure they are using/selling that data
|
| Is there solid evidence that supports this, or are you saying
| it based on intuition?
| nawgz wrote:
| What do you think free apps do to make money? Especially
| one which is hosting real-time communications?
|
| There's a reason they shove the app down your throat even
| though the website works perfectly...
| wheybags wrote:
| They sell premium subscriptions
| georgyo wrote:
| Not evidence that they are selling or even collecting this
| data, but discord _must_ look at the process and/or window
| table periodically to know when you are playing a video
| game so it can give you the one click stream button.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Personally, suspicion. The other two comments combined
| cover it: Discord _does_ look at all your processes to see
| if you 're playing games, and having not read the EULA but
| knowing how "free" apps that cost money to operate work, I
| assume they are doing some kind of analytics and selling
| that data.
| nucleardog wrote:
| It's just an electron app. Rather than just flinging mud,
| it'd be relatively easy for anyone to actually find
| evidence of this.
|
| That there are several articles about people reverse
| engineering the client and protocol and nobody else has
| brought this up, I feel pretty comfortable calling this
| unfounded unless you can provide some indication
| otherwise.
| nawgz wrote:
| > relatively easy
|
| You would have to show all network activity from the app
| never includes this type of information or anything
| derived from it, because as soon as anything goes server-
| side it can be used for anything. Is this actually easy?
| jarcane wrote:
| I have at this point lost count of the number of times I or
| someone else I know on Discord has described getting
| Youtube recs or ads directly referencing shit they'd just
| talked about.
|
| I started getting blasted with YT recs for weeks for a
| channel I had never heard of, never watched, had no real
| common connections with ... until someone referenced them
| in a conversation on Discord.
|
| Now, you can shit on that as anecdotal or "intuition" or
| whatever, but come on. This is HN. No one here is ignorant
| about the level of data sharing that goes on in the adtech
| space, and everyone claims they don't until Gmail's selling
| you ads based on your emails.
|
| It's not like someone's just argued that the president is a
| space alien. We're talking about suggesting a for-profit
| internet company is doing something that literally damn
| near all the for-profit internet companies do and have done
| now for decades. The bigger question is to how anyone could
| be so credulous as to assume they are _not_.
| jeffwask wrote:
| I would leave Discord in a hot second for a client that just
| did that basics discord used to do before they became a
| platform.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Gamers aren't going to leave what they already have -why
| would they?
|
| There are several reasons, based on personal experience with
| discord's limitations, why some gamer would switch.
|
| 1) Lack of accessibility. It is very hard to include deaf
| people in voice chats.
|
| 2) Lack of advanced voice capabilities. There is no way to
| setup channels where there talkers that are only heard by a
| subset of listeners. If you are using discord voice to
| coordinate large groups of players it can be extremely hard to
| manage.
|
| 3) Lack of Bot developer support. There are significant issues
| with how Discord has developed their APIs and how they treat
| 3rs party developers.
|
| 4) Censorship. Many gamers are irreverant / bot PC and the
| centralized nature if Discord pretty much guarantees that
| Discord will eventually face issues with moderation and
| censorship that will drive people elsewhere.
|
| If Fosscord can keep (feature complete) client interoperability
| while adding additional features for self-hosted servers, there
| is a decent chance that a significant minority would move to
| Fosscord.
|
| I would expect that if such starts to actually happen, Discord
| will do everything they can to put legal and technical
| roadblocks in the way of Fosscord.
| Shadonototra wrote:
| > Gamers aren't going to leave what they already have -why
| would they? Edus sure as heck won't -who does that leave, a
| couple of hackers? Maybe?
|
| they do, you need target specific group of the population, then
| with time (years), it spreads to other new generations
|
| that's how teamspeak died, it's userbase was aging and as a
| result died with time only for discord to take over
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(page generated 2021-10-11 23:00 UTC)