I recall it being slow, with frequent downtime, poor mardown support, and having very poor (or nonexistent? can’t remember exactly) first party non-web clients. I vaguely recall some third party apps picking up the slack (pun!), but integration was pretty basic (they did their best).

It basically stagnated like it was abandon, and then hipchat (atlassian bought and killed it) and later slack just ate its lunch.

As DHH would say, Luxury languages are good for development.

I got a kick out of seemingly server-side browser blocking https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire/blob/eecdb29332527... without one iota of "but, why?"

Could it be that they removed /all/ comments from the codebase when they made it public, to not release some sensitive information that was in them?

It's Ruby. No amount of comments will make somebody who doesn't grok Ruby understand the code.

Reminds me of Ash (Elixir framework).

Seems great on paper, but quickly turns into a nightmare. Magic is great to get you up to speed, but as soon as you find yourself having to bend the magic, good luck.

There's a Dockerfile and instructions on how to build it.

> although that last one was kind of addressed by the once link because in its FAQ is "we don't care about your other platforms" so the answer is "because NIH is awesome"

The 37Signals (now Basecamp) company found a lot of success in the past by creating simple web tools and then marketing them hard into new (at the time) marketing spaces like podcasts and social media. Using small company 37Signals products instead of corporate Jira was viewed as forward thinking, rebellious, and the superior choice in some contexts. DHH (founder) was constantly stirring up controversy and clickbait and leveraging it as marketing. I actually saw it more from people in non-tech companies, some of whom would boast about using 37Signals tools as a sign that they were keeping up with technology trends.

I tried using their tools multiple times over their early years but never felt impressed, so I always migrated away. They were the kind of company that was highly opinionated, didn’t care how other companies did things, and didn’t care how you wanted to use the tools. They built what they built and they were going to gaslight you into believing you didn’t actually want the features they didn’t have (until they implemented them later, of course). For people who hung on DHH’s every word this all seemed eminently correct, but all of the DHH and 37Signals fanatics I knew eventually had some break where they realized there was more to the world and that other tools were actually very good and often better.

As for this tool: I think they just have enough success and cash that they can build whatever they want and have fun. If the past trends hold, they’re probably trying some reality distortion field marketing to convince users that other platforms are bad for some reason and you don’t actually want any of the features that they haven’t shipped in this product (until they ship them, at which point they become great).

I think using importmaps might be why it is restricted (see https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire/blob/main/app/cont...) to some browser versions.

One can try to migrate it to vitejs for example or any other JS/CSS build tool and it might have good chances maybe to work on older browsers.

> Aren’t people not even remotely interested in the app?

Could be extremely useful to many communities given (free) Slack no longer stores messages beyond 90 days.