Clojurians Log v2
spam-reports 2024-12-15
https://once.com/campfire Does anyone have experience with Campfire? I don’t particularly care for DHH on a personal level, but pay-once server-installable software with some updates and limited commercial support may be a solid option for a self-hosted chat app. It may be more robust than a OSS equivalent, and the license even includes access to the (Ruby) source code. However, it currently does not offer a Slack import, and is also intended to be browser-only (no mobile apps, just a mobile friendly PWA), so those limitations may automatically rule it out already.
I'm worried that an attempt at moving away from slack will pulverize the community, but if it is to be attempted I'm skeptical about yet another proprietary privately owned platform. In that regard, I give Campfire a thumbs up, as it's not in someone else's backyard. It does need someone to take responsibility for the hosting though, and it will cost a little bit. But I'd be happy to pitch in the hosting costs 👍 😊
Anyone has experience with using Campfire, and can compare with Slack?
As I noted in another thread, in general self-hosting is not a viable solution long-term because maintainers -- individuals or companies -- have a tendency to move on to other tech and you lose the whole thing. And that's without considering any ongoing costs for running an appropriate server setup, for a service that people expect to be both fast and available 24x7...
Someone would have to take on stewardship, but I can see the challenge. In that case I don't think it's worth it to try to move.
Well, there's a number of "clojure services" that users prop up (gaiwan, clojureverse, etc) that have no free counterpart. It'd be nice to have a completely free solution, but those free services come and go too. How long till a new CEO changes discord's business model? Hmm, what's this about? https://tryquiet.org/
Technical details: https://github.com/TryQuiet/quiet/#technical-overview
It uses Tor by default and uses "IPFS and https://orbitdb.org, an https://ipfs.io/-based https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-free_replicated_data_type"
kinda p2p, looks like
Seems impractical for a community of our size and the roadmap says a lot of features are still missing -- plus I see no mention of moderation facilities, which is a must-have.
FYI: including shared files, Clojurians Slack has well over 20G of content -- in a p2p model, every user has all content locally, according to what Quiet says on their website.
Yeah, looks like message and user removal is a planned feature
And the repo says there's a 300 member limit right now, hmm
Not fully cooked yet
Messages only live on user devices and ipfs though, presumably, which is interesting
And one of the key features people actually want is full history searching, with a decent level of search functionality (which most of these "secure" chat apps do not have).
Yeah. For the p2p plays, users would have to relay to a public server like clojurians.log
Unless you could make a p2p app that can be crawled by google's bot in a browser 🤔
And bear in mind that folks typically want something that is easy to install and use on mobile, desktop, and a browser.
All true. It's the holy grail though, y'all. Hold out hope for the p2p future 😁
A usable thing would ideally keep the history forever on IPFS or something
Most of the folks who specifically want p2p and encryption don't care much about UX and aren't motivated to improve it. GPG suffers from the same problem, which is why Clojars gave up on encouraging signing of artifacts (and why every Clojure tool except Leiningen doesn't even bother with it these days 🙂 ).
Push notifications are problem for p2p too. Somebody has to pay the GCM ferryman to make it go bing on phones, I believe
mmmmaybe it's Google Firebase Cloud Messaging for android now idk
I guess you could let users pay for the notification fee directly in app. FCM is free for some cases, allegedly. This one Pusher Beams has interesting pricing: > • The free Sandbox tier allows you to send push notifications to 1,000 subscribers. > • The $29/month Startup tier allows you to send push notifications to 10,000 subscribers. > • The $99/month Pro tier allows you to send push notifications to 50,000 subscribers. > • The $199/month Business tier allows you to send push notifications to 115,000 subscribers. > • The $23999/month Premium tier allows you to send push notifications to 250,000 subscribers.
By user instead of per message. 30 a month would be doable
Hmm, there's apparently self hosted options. Can't imagine they'd be as good as native push mechanisms on mobile battery
You'd need your own client on each device polling, I'd guess
These really are not productive suggestions for the problem at hand. I'm sure they're "interesting problems" to you, but none of this is useful in the context of wanting a good multi-platform UX, free for users, not self-hosted (see several comments in several threads here about why), with good moderation tools, etc, etc.
I don't suppose anyone is against self-hosted in principle, just that most solutions suck right now. Yeah, these suggestions are more-so for the discussion around home-grown options, which, sure, is mostly a conversation in my own head, so take it with a grain of salt
That's it, Sean... You're forcing me to go build the thing, just to prove you wrong! 😡
Kidding
How can I set up the Zulip mirror bot? Do I just invite it to a channel?
Just invite should do it indeed @cfleming
So I just tried this, and I realised that it's already added to #cursive, I must have added it previously. However, there's no cursive channel in Zulip (well, I added one just recently, but the messages are not being replicated). Should I have created the channel when I invited the bot, i.e. it won't automatically create the channel? Also, I just realised that over here the channel is cursive and over there it's Cursive, i.e. different capitalisation - could that be why it's not replicating?
One more question - does the bot retroactively go back and sync old messages, or just the new ones?
If I try to create a cursive channel over there, it says that one with that name already exists, so I'm not sure what's going on. Anyone who can shed some light on this?
The bot puts everything under the slack-archive channel on zulip. Unrelated to any other top-level channels. And, no, it does not backfill.
Ah thanks Sean, that explains it.
Also a signal group called Clojure https://signal.group/#CjQKIBkjobRkHS04UroCwRHhfZIVMGVwpQAZ2i5u4OIoRqnmEhDKBvveDasiBXm_LE8P-XE3
signal chats have max 1000 users, and get unwieldy for long discussions very quickly because there’s no way to group things into channels or topics.
plus no global history
hmm
Not sure if signal groups will have great moderation tools but they're highly trusted securitywise
Hi! I joined this channel after @seancorfield’s post about Slack plan and sponsorship. I have two questions: first, how much does it cost if we pay for it? Slack says, 1 user costs about 5 dollars, which means 20K users costs 100K usd per month? Are there special plans for vast non-profit communities? If yes, how much are they?
Right now there are 2,611 users which is close to $19k per month.
Ah, and I thought all users count:
Only "active" users count. But nearly $20k/month is a lot of money.
The second question is (to not mix the thoughts): did anyone consider Telegram? It has topics, it's free, fast, lightweight, with unlimited history, funny stickers. There is a small english-speaking group already: https://t.me/clojure_en When choosing a community platform, to me, the most important thing is a client. Electron-based clients with Node.js + Chrome (like Slack and similar) are slow and tough. At the same time, Telegram offers native clients written in C++, QT and Cocoa that are times faster. What do you think?
Telegram has awful search and terrible moderation tools. And threads there are an after-thought - most channels are a mess.
I use Telegram daily but I would never host a community there, as p-himik said, moderation tools are non-existent practically and threads are bad.
I love Telegram. Never thought of it as a Russian thing. I doubt it would work very well for how we use this Slack though. For that we need to think in terms of why Slack is such a good fit.
I strongly believe moderation should be held by community, not a platform which decides for you what is right and what is not. I'm a member of some Telegram communities, and we have anti-spam bots and admin people sitting in various time zones. Not an issue at all.
Another solution is to host our own inc/jabber server. It wound't cost too much, and people can donate for hosting it.
Please correct me if I'm wrong but IIRC XMPP is quite limited (no threads, at the very least) and clients are not interoperable (some support images, some do not; some support specific formatting, some do not, etc.).
If folks liked IRC, there would be a lot more people active in the libera.chat channels 🙂 Self-hosting has generally been viewed as a non-starter in the past because maintainers -- whether individuals or companies -- have a tendency to move on to other tech at some point and then you lose everything. The same goes for community-built chat apps (and indeed a few projects got started years ago when Slackocalypse was first brought up -- when Slack were shutting down large communities -- and none of those projects turned into anything usable).
> There's no web client? it has a web client, even two https://telegram.org/apps > it's mostly a Russian thing The founder has been living in Saudi Arabia for the last 12 years > Seems to require a phone for that... Yes
> The founder has been living in Saudi Arabia for the last 12 years I believe the sentiment wasn't directed at where the founder lives, but rather who the main users of the platform are.
See the thread above (Zulip, Discord, etc). I don't know anyone on Telegram -- I get the impression it's mostly a Russian thing?
I wouldn't say it's a Russian-only thing. I have plenty of European-based colleagues there.
At least anyone who is interested can join the group mentioned above and try it
There's no web client? You have to download an app?
There is a web client which I haven't used for years: https://web.telegram.org/ Nowadays, it looks like one should create an account using a mobile/desktop app first
Seems to require a phone for that...