Harmony: Chat like Discord. Federated like email

28 pointsposted 11 hours ago
by FinalDestiny

18 Comments

heavensteeth

4 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

3 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.

Slow_Hand

9 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.

CSSer

31 minutes 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.

sparky_

9 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

7 hours ago

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

enemy777

6 hours ago

Could you name 1gram of the problems?

cowlevel

4 hours ago

"waiting to receive message" and it never gets received

Arathorn

an hour 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

9 hours ago

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

unethical_ban

8 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

8 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

7 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

3 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?

voxic11

6 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.

cowlevel

7 hours ago

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

AustinDev

9 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.

N8works

5 hours ago

I liked this idea when Google called it Wave. Lol