Show HN: Everchat 1.0 – Build your community in the fastest way ever
everch.at
everch.at
Your our own instance of Mattermost, Discord, or any well know service like those. We manage it for you on our servers, keep it running and up to date. You have admin access to the web app, not to the server. Pay per seat? You can get a db dump at any time and start it over somewhere else.
Basically it's what we get from Slack but we would really own the data. We must trust the service provider but those machines are already in somebody's else cloud, so not a big change.
They host a matrix.org server (Synapse) and a web client frontend (Element) on any domain. If you want to, you can also just host it yourself later.
Element is very good these days!
Another requirement of my list would be "Use your own domain". That would increase portability. I didn't think about it.
It's basically Mattermost in Cloud with everything else remaining same. You don't get raw access to the database, but you can get an effective dump of your data any time.
* Moving around is clumsy. If I'm in a channel, it's hard to know how to get back out or to the previous menus without hitting the back button.
* I tried to upload a gif and it just hung without responding. Not sure if the gif ever went through but I eventually got bored of waiting. If it was working - maybe a progress bar on uploading?
* Obviously spam is already a problem. The popular communities list, and the new communities list, are just people mashing their keyboards to create test communities.
* Channel title length needs to be limited. (See the channels with huge names that are ruining the "New Channels" page)
* How does "No censorship" work in terms of malicious content, spam, pornography, etc? If it works like it sounds, I'm not sure I'd like to browse it. Do I really want to see gifs of animals being tortured, shocksite images, etc. People self-promoting and trying to sell things - if people used it wouldn't this be a huge part of the content?
* How would you fall on the subreddits that reddit banned - e.g. jailbail, fatpeoplehate, racist groups? Communities that are not quite illegal, but clearly toxic. Doesn't it seem like by enabling such people to get together and coordinate you are helping to promote toxic behavior?
* The website became non-responsive for me at least once and I had to kill the tab. Looks like it was waiting on firebasestorage googleapis. A better failure mode let me know something had gone wrong, or load as much as possible, without just crashing the tab.
You brought up very good points and yes, we are concerned with the same problem you're bringin up. In the future, we want communities to self-police themselves, but for that, people on Everchat need adequate tools, which we haven't even start building yet.
The issue of non-responsivity became apparent when someone (2 hours into launch) tried to crash the site with the unlimited title length :D This should already be hotfixed, so the waiting times shouldn't be that long! :)
During the past year, we were working hard on making Everchat happen. Today, we're proud to present you with the first public version of it!
We're looking forward to seeing what channels you'll create, what topics you'll talk about, and what we can improve and build to make Everchat better for you.
Features in this launch:
- Account creation
- Your and others' profiles
- Create a public channel
- Create a thread
- Reply
- Upvote and downvote
- @mention, #hashtag, !channel
- Earn karma
- Channel members overview
- Share (copy link)
- Search (channels and people)
- Email notifications
If you want to leave any other feedback, let us know here in the comment section below, contact us via email or Twitter, or the best way is to tell us in the https://everch.at/feedback channel.
> Basic human right: We at Everchat believe that Internet freedom is one of our and our users’ fundamental human rights.
> Data anonymity: We promise never to give any of your private or personally identifiable information to 3rd parties.
> No censorship: Everchat is censorless, but we reserve rights to take down any subject to criminal activity.
Given the values you communicate, what (apart from pinky promises) do you do differently to assure users that these are fulfilled? How do you avoid making yourselves a SPoF?
Is the protocol open? Can I self-host? Will sources be made available and if so under what license?
The app looks clean and useful. It's a no-bullshit approach to a digital free speech space. Could be useful for example in my country of choice: I live in Thailand and we have a democracy movement that faces real threats form the monarchy and government.
I read your legal docs. They are pretty clear from what I understand. What's not so clear to me are 3 things:
1. How does everchat protect me? I am in Thailand and breaking local laws like talking about the Monarchy can land me in Jail or void my Visa and Work permit.
2. I thought an Impressum is mandatory in GDPR, it looks a bit shady to me, having an app and not seeing an Impressum with a real address and company name.
3. What's everchat's buisness model, and how are you gonna make money? (If part of this includes using my personal data, I am fine with it, as long as I exactly understand how you gonna use it.)
> "We promise never to give any of your private or personally identifiable information to 3rd parties."
>"Everchat is censorless, but we reserve rights to take down any subject to criminal activity."
How will you reconcile privacy with the "Basic human right of Internet freedom" and takedown requests from authoritarian governments against dissidents who break local speech laws?
How will you handle NSFW posts?
According to the Terms & Conditions (https://everch.at/legal), Everchat JSA is governed by the laws of Slovakia, but I am not familiar with Slovakian free speech laws and liability for platforms.
Hopefully we can decentralize the platform in the way that we will be able to back-track history (once we open-source on GitHub).
> "How will you handle NSFW posts?"
Just like on Reddit, there will be a Settings toggle to show/hide them.
you can check out our PH post's last image, there are couple of things we're planning in the future https://www.producthunt.com/posts/everchat-1-0
Does Everchat have ambitions to be this kind of private community where companies can interact with their users, etc or is the target something else?
0: https://kitemaker.co, the super fast, hotkey-driven product management tool/issue tracker that has deep integrations to GitHub, Figma, Slack, etc.
Slack is free which is really appealing. But it is a barrier for some people because they don't want to open another slack workspace (slack fatigue).
We also integrate to Discord and like that a lot so that's one option for us for sure.
Couple of notes:
- Loving the UI.
- Home should say what is everchat, features, differentiating factors.
- Peek into "popular channels" without login.
- Sign up email comes from a random firebase domain, not the same as the welcome.
- Haven't managed to post a comment, getting 500 on a `s?l=dataLayer` resource (chrome macOS).
- Ability to enable notifications (email and/or html5) on specific channels.
- A monthly or so email about new features, stats, or changes would be nice. I don't think I'd use it right now but if it managed to get traction I'd be up for it.
- Maybe: Invite only rooms? Discord style.> "Loving the UI." <3
> "Home should say what is everchat, features, differentiating factors." Will add this to our backlog. We're getting this request a lot!
> "Peek into "popular channels" without login." Same as the above
> "Sign up email comes from a random firebase domain, not the same as the welcome." Yeah we know about this, we requested a custom domain but Google is taking its time :D
> "Haven't managed to post a comment, getting 500 on a `s?l=dataLayer` resource (chrome macOS)." Don't really know what's going on here, but will look into it.
> "Ability to enable notifications (email and/or html5) on specific channels." Great idea!!!
> "A monthly or so email about new features, stats, or changes would be nice. I don't think I'd use it right now but if it managed to get traction I'd be up for it." Monthly email update is setup :)
> "Maybe: Invite only rooms? Discord style." Private channels that are accessible only for people with a token are on our roadmap. :)
we had to go into a temporary maintenance mode right now, because we had too much load and we weren’t ready for it. We'll update you as soon as we're up and running again.
Btw, I'm reading all the feedback, and it's highly appreciated!
It's not like the server is not working, it does indeed return HTML/JS, only that it doesn't do anything.
Unless otherwise specified, I assume that it will be applying to an app, but not to a marketing website—because these are almost always treated as separate things, and shifting the app into maintenance mode doesn’t take down the marketing site (even if it’s on the same infrastructure).
I expect URLs like https://everch.at and https://everch.at/about to be part of a marketing website, because that’s almost always what they are.
What I observe is that the marketing site part (presuming I’m right about it being marketing site—I still haven’t seen the page) seems to all be there and responding fine, loading its unreasonably large megabytes of JavaScript rather than just serving plain sensible HTML, but that it doesn’t actually render anything. There are no JavaScript errors in the console; the only potential hint is that it’s getting a 503 from wss://everchat-server.herokuapp.com. But is that the cause? It’s not at all normal for a marketing site to break if a WebSocket connection fails. What’s it trying to do? I have no idea. So I give up and ask. :-)
If trying to take down the entire thing, I’d hope for all requests to the website to yield a 503 response with some kind of “Everchat got overloaded, be back in a day or two” simple HTML response.
- filled in the new channel form
- had to sign up
- put in email. woops that was the login form. Clicked log in, email disappeared
- refilled form, got email. Email says "evechat" not "everchat"
- followed link. channel wasn't created, had to do it again
And yeah this flow sucks. We'll be looking into it ASAP, as many people already struggled with it.
Thanks!! <3
If the platform is proprietary, it is oppressive - and therefore there is no community. Just prisoners sharing a cell.
Promises mean nothing nowadays.
But the strict legalese isn't going to happen because it would only take one data breach for the company to be destroyed by lawsuits. There's always a clause in there somewhere.