Heim – A real-time community platform | Hacker News Reader

Heim – A real-time community platform

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I kind of like the idea of threaded chatting. Is there any other chat program that uses this idea?

Does IRC count?

It does not. "Threaded" in this sense means "hierarchical chat messages," like the comment threads here on HN.

XMPP protocol has an extension for that http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0201.html IIRC oneteam[0] supports it.

[0] http://oneteam.im/

Is that bound to their servers or can I use any standard XMPP server?

Scrollback ( https://scrollback.io/scrollback ) does, but in a different way (just two levels threading, each thread displayed as a card).

I don't think HN-like multi-level threading would work very well with chat - you expect chat messages to be chronological.

Facebook Wall.

Wave

It has the same problem every other threaded system has: notification of updates. How do you know what's changed and what hasn't? At least with linear chat you can draw a line on the screen and everything below it is new. Slashdot wasn't bad in that it greyed out everything you'd already seen and only show you the new messages, but even then you had to scroll all the way up and down the page to see what's new. If you could tag threads to follow...

WOAH. I just found the hidden side pane that organizes all conversations by date, the most recent changes at the top. You click on it and it shows you the whole thread. Then you click on 'new pane' and it opens just that thread in a new window!!

Well done, gentlemen. Well done.

Designer/frontend dev here -- thank you! Helping users understand what is going on in the tree has been a core challenge. However, exposing too much right away is very overwhelming, especially to people who are unaccustomed similar chat interfaces. I've been learning a lot about how to get the UX for this right from user feedback, but there's much more to explore. If you are interested in chatting about this problem, feel free to ping me in &heim. :)

One amusing anecdote. We very recently rolled out two bits of functionality: auto-collapsing long threads, and defaulting to replying to your own thread you started. Many of the people who jumped in and started spamming today didn't realize they were confined to their own collapsed threads. :)

Yes.

Flowdock ( https://www.flowdock.com/ ) a Slack competitor, we use it at our company.

I have a hard time going back to IRC and Slack because it is so difficult when two or three conversations goes on at the same time in busy rooms. Flowdock only lets you go one conversation deep, though.

I get a message saying it's not ready for Hacker News yet, so I can't even see what's going on :-(

...not anymore. Thanks!

I've been a user on the site for a few months now. There's a lot you can imagine would be difficult with threaded chat, but in practice it works pretty well, to the point that I generally miss having the ability to reply to a specific message on other chat platforms.

Seems interesting - is the site invite-only for now? Care to invite your ol' pal fit2rule from HN? :)

Some of the rooms are private, but you're welcome to check out https://euphoria.io/room/heim/ (the dev chat) and https://euphoria.io/room/welcome/ (where most newcomers end up.) There's also an xkcd chat, which was very active for a while, but I'm not sure what it's like now.

This is like IRC and FB posts fused together. I love it. In traditional IRC you have many topics intertwined - very distracting / waste of time if you only care about a single topic and don't have time to sift through everything typed. Slack very much suffers from that same problem - you care about something important - and there's all that noise.

With the introduction of threaded conversations you could collapse and ignore threads you don't care about and drill into the details of the things you want/need.

Love it! Congrats Max and team!

I like that you can host it yourself. I'ld like to guide my company away from email+phone but it is a long way to go. And in Europe there are still a lot of concerns if you can't host something in your own environment.

I don't see any FOSS / paid modern solutions similar to slack, flowdock, scrollback, .. ready to be hosted in your environment. HipChat seems to be the only solution with a standalone server available. There are some open source competitors but they are far from production-ready. Am I missing something?

Have you checked out Let's Chat? http://sdelements.github.io/lets-chat/

https://euphoria.io/room/dev/

Looks like the IRC on my other monitor..

There's a trend of seemingly reinventing IRC and just putting it into the browser with a "hip" UI as of late.

By "reinventing IRC" you mean "making any kind of chat software"?

Making any kind of chat software without compelling improvements over IRC. Familiarity itself doesn't count.

Threaded replies does seem nice to have, but not nice enough that I'd be willing to give up on the other features of IRC.

One thing that'd be nice to have with IRC is if there were a cheap host somewhere that easily let people run their own weechat instance; too many of the people I talk with keep disconnecting because they don't have / can't be bothered with having their own server with a bouncer. (There's stuff like http://blinkenshell.org/wiki/Start but I was thinking something that one can recommend to complete newbies.)

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What else would be nice to have in IRC?

The interesting thing about IRC is that it can be modified to suit any individual's taste. But, that takes time and expertise. That guarantees IRC will stay within a niche audience of people technical enough to bend it to their will. What I'm liking about these new chat systems is it has some of the best features of IRC made available to all users with an interface they can understand and use.

Maybe not for you, but there's plenty of applications where ease-of-use and threaded conversations are a very big deal.

I wonder what other old 90's tech we can reinvent to make trendy again. Text based terminal RPGs? Warez groups? Demoscene?

LambdaMOO would be nice.

For a very good reason, mind you. IRC isn't for normal people. Nor does it support threaded conversations.

I see a picture of a cat, a bad drawing of an orange and a not-handsome guy. Only that.

But does it federate? (Honest question, did not see a documentation for that)

It should be trivial to federate it via Matrix.org if they felt the urge :)

How does Matrix compare to xmpp? I do not see a lot of differences (however, xmpp is kind of mature)

Looks like a more confusing version of IRC.

amazing stuff, pushing React to its limit! flat chats will never be the same again!

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