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Very clean, super snappy, no external dependencies. Excellent first impression. Compliments to the chef.

That said, this needs a self-hosted option to be truly useful. One, for privacy reasons. Two, for decouple from you as a service provider. In particular, your service will get abused and sorting it out will put an undue burden on you, which in turn will likely cause you to throw the towel in at some point. The best remedy is to spread the admin load and let people host this themselves. A level up from there is to have a form of federation to let people from one instance participate in groups on other instances. If you manage to figure this out, while keeping the spirit and the aesthetics, you will have something both practical and durable.

I do agree. The hard part will be figuring out how to do that. So my background is in networks and I think SMTP was always a great example of a solid network. The question on the self hosting front is, how many moving parts will people tolerate. This was built on a past Dev product. So there's a lot of inherit tech debt. I'd have to rebuild a version that could be self hosted and federated. Just depends on whether it makes practical sense.

my bias is in product development experience so from that lens i think it's a mistake to focus on the technical aspect of your pitch, or really any technical improvement. "chat is a solved problem" to people. mind you, i get annoyed when people say that line, but it's good way to force a discipline to focus on the unique people problem, not make another chat stack.

the sentiment needs to land: are humans gonna sign up and bring other humans to interact with.

right now the messaging on the landing page isn't good enough to evoke that, but that's ok it's v1.

if you ask me, products need to be instantly understandable in like a 5-10 word sentence. and that sentence can take hundreds of iterations.

"1 hour grocery delivery" is the perfect product market fit. it's undeniable. disclaimer: used to work for this company =p

Haha this is good advice. I have been known to spend thousands of iterations on landing pages and readmes for Dev tools. So I think I'm all for the iterations. And yea I agree there's more to be done on the messaging side. I appreciate the advice. I'm also just looking at the practicalities of a self hosted offering. I'd have to rebuild parts of it from the ground up to make that happen. And federation yea a taller ask. But I will take these things seriously and try to understand it a bit more. I totally get it because it's been on my mind a long time, good to see someone else feels the same.

Moving parts are less of an issue if you could build it into a Docker container.

Yea considering that but it would be a massive container with some quirks still to solve. I think it will depend on how many people really initially ask for it and then whether we can see a path forward for it.

When I read this description the first thing it makes me think about is how this is different from any other IM client. When I go to your website I see a couple fluffy sentences and then a signup link.

This might be a great product but I have about a 12 second attention span for random new HN apps wherein I decide if I'm interested or not. I don't think I am atypical in that respect.

You might benefit from a few screenshots, is all i'm saying.

I think the screenshot thing is coming up a lot so I'll craft something for it. On holiday at the moment with no laptop. Just thought I'd share it asap!

Pro tip, don't plan a holiday right after releasing a project publicly (especially HN). There will inevitably be bugs, server may crash, someone may try to hack server data, etc.

:D I was in the middle of a holiday and on a whim decided to post it. I'm sort of in a strange phase of trying to figure my life out and part of that means reflexively doing things in the hope it works. Past HN traction usually gave me enough confidence to keep going, so thanks to all here!

On the surface it looks like WhatsApp group chat, signal group chat, they all have privacy and encryption. How do you guys deal with marketing against these guys.

Yeah, even iMessage is encrypted (though its not as if I trust it!) I'm not sure what this offers that many other established services doesn't.

> I think the tech and the product will evolve but only by finding out if others feel the same.

Yes, I agree, my personal tagline I play around with is: "the future is human"

It's supposed to be witty marketing. There's always value in zagging when people zig. Tons of energy and interest in AI and automation, I think it's reasonable to see a counter-balance of value in deliberately human, small-scale, ephemeral experiences/actions/art.

During the metaverse craze my tagline was "the Metaverse is 2D". It's pointing out that for all the effort to cross the uncanny valley, people continue to love retro 2D games, animal crossing, and I personally love the artistic style of "Paper Mario" where 2D characters navigate a 3D world.

Anyway, all to say, I'm with you that there's something really brewing in an "answer" to TikTok, Meta, Metaverse, AI, etc, etc not even that theres' something "wrong" with these pursuits, rather it's just really exhausting, and low-fidelity experiences that lean on old world humanness is a break that feels good, increasingly.

Thanks that's really positive to hear! And I agree. Where everyone is talking about AI I'm really thinking, what does a private human only network look like. We should really just all go offline but in the digital world that means going private and not letting AI see our conversations. You can bet every corporation is now running chats through AI. You have no control over this. Plus yea the addictive nature of social media has made it really hard to detach from it. If we could slow down the pace, maybe we give ourselves a chance to reset and recover.

> "the future is human"

I concur strongly, there are seemingly daily new "ai" chat bot apps and yet I personally don't see human behavior fundamentally changing any time soon. Chat will always be primarily about humans and not bots.

I really like this idea. No bots. It's quite refreshing considering everything is about to get AI-ified.

I would love to see some screenshots or examples of the service on the landing page. Right now the landing page is sparse and I have no idea of what the experience will be like. There will be a huge hurdle to get people to leave the assortment of networks they are already on. What makes this different than Signal, WhatsApp, Discord, Facebook Groups, Telegram, or any other messaging service?

Few suggestions - The "Get started" button should take me to the sign up form, not the login form. My assumption is I am clicking the CTA to start without having an account. Going to the login form results in an extra click for the user. - Once I click "get started" the app breaks the back button. I can't go back to the landing page - Make your terms of use & privacy policy accessible from the landing page. Claiming to be "privacy first" but not having an accessible privacy policy feels in conflict

Thanks, I'll take those comments on board. I literally just posted it as soon as I thought it was ready to go. I think the big elephant in the room is definitely how you get people to move off other platforms but then I realised I can't build with that mindset. I have to build something I would want to use first and then hope there will be many others like me. My primary goal is a place I can build these small communities for my family, my friends, my interests, my religion, etc. I just feel like that's really missing. The world is too public. I need to take this all private.

I'll look into the other stuff you mentioned too. I think the whole privacy first thing is to just say, it's an invite only network and nothing is public. But I know people care about privacy policies and terms of use. Tbh it's mostly us tech folk who bark on about it. Normal people don't care. My wife doesn't care. I gloss over these things. But I understand.

I really admire Asim's work probably know him for his Go microservices thing. I was quite excited about the developer platform he was building and the microservices platform before on the same link but it took a strange turn. Anyways always like how he can keep things very simple with everything and will go ahead and give this a try. Hopefully this is the final product iteration of micro.mu, Best wishesh :)

Thanks for the kind words! Sorry the other stuff took a bad turn. I raised VC funding in 2019 as a solo founder and ended up in the relentless pursuit of product market fit after building an oss project. That plus COVID plus a baby plus not being able to raise further funding made life pretty hard and I was making fast painful decisions. I honestly had big hopes for micro and the microservices side of things. Unfortunately it was just too hard as one person and harder trying to build a Dev product around it.

This sounds pretty awesome, like a private Discord server or replacement for Facebook groups that's actually private (assuming it can be self-hosted or encrypted).

One thing I noticed is that there's no privacy policy. I assume this is a proof of concept but people willing to use this product over Facebook care about how their information is stored and protected.

Yes this is a proof of concept. I'm just trying to figure out what the core features should be and whether other people will be interested too. It can potentially be self hosted but it's quite a complex stack at the moment. There's encryption at rest of the data but not e2e encryption of messages just yet. Will look into that a bit later. I think mostly the focus is provide a place for small private communities to be built and start addressing those issues over time.

Here is some straight forward feedback and advice. There is no compelling reason to use your chat as of now. Look at the first 3 things you talk about. Private. Anyone can setup a private group already an dozens of msging apps. Real Networks. Same as first, can already be done. Topic oriented. So channels?

You might be a skilled dev, but you still have to make something that is either better than what exist or different.

Thanks for the feedback. I guess my issue is, as a user of slack, discord, twitter, WhatsApp and other chat products, they have never really solved my community problems. Discord is a largely public gamer platform that is now being used for other things. Twitter is a public broadcast network. Slack is for work. WhatsApp is private but single channel groups and owned by Facebook. I'm not trying to build for the sake of building. I just honestly can't find a place to build small private communities in a sane way. I want to add events and todos and a few other things. Think of it like private Facebook groups. I also want to try build something managed by a small collective of engineers who want to pull their data off these public platforms.

I appreciate the comments though.

"I just honestly can't find a place to build small private communities in a sane way."

Signal does exactly this and I've used it to build a small private community of people who listen to my podcast. It's wonderful.

Signal isn't a great option for general community group chat if you primarily use it for immediate (urgent) texting, though. It breaks down especially when you add global connections in different time zones.

We are a small group with a discord "server" - and that works for us because most of us doesn't use discord for anything else - and i can comfortably have only notifications for dm/mentions and otherwise read it async at my leisure.

Granted discord has a gazillion knobs to tune notifications - but i could never make it work reasonably for diverse use cases like "wake me up in the night if family tries to reach me" and "never nag me about game updates - that I'll strictly check manually".

This would replace WhatsApp for me, but what’s to stop you turning into another Facebook?

I don't really want to build another megacorp. I've done the VC funded route and played the ambition dream chasing game. It's not for me. If anything, the mission is to be the anti-facebook. To build something community led and community owned. I don't think we have enough of those things. It basically comes down to, who do you trust. I trust me, and hopefully you'll come to trust me too.

What do you mean by "build small private communities"?

Is it not the case that when you're hanging out with some people, someone asks "hey man what's your facebook/number/discord" and then you get added to the group chat on whatever platform?

I have been assuming that reddit (and thus redit clone software) is 'find a place to build small private communities in a sane way. " - admittedly I have not used it, so it's just assumption.

I can say from experience that wordpress+buddypress handles multiple private / public / partial each / optional for each group and profile.. all these things right out of the box, free, and WP is installable via softalicious on basic shared hosting environments.. as well as one click installs at places like DO I believe..

I like your calling to build more private group options, it's something I have hobbied with for more than a decade.

I think ultimately the roads for this end on paid instances that have an easy method for not just deploying - but migrating to other servers and moving domains and such as well - there becomes this push pull from edge cases of speech that will make the need to split and move the groups.

editing to add deeper dive into similar things in another thread popping today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36141083

> Anyway I'm sharing this now to get some feedback. I think the tech and the product will evolve but only by finding out if others feel the same.

I love that the hamburger menu icon is the image of a burger. Thank you for the laugh :D

Thanks! Gotta give credit to a past friend and colleague who came up with that idea when we went through a previous incarnation of this for teams during the pandemic.

I wish the code repository was linked from the website to make it easier to find. It would be nice to see some screenshots of feature details without having to sign into your instance.

Will take that on board. Does it matter where the code is? Doesn't seem like people care about Notions source code.

It doesn't matter to me where the code is. But you said it was "open source" so I assume the source code is publicly accessible somewhere, right?

Sorry what I meant is I've been working on the open source Micro project for 8 years which underpins this. The chat app itself was not really something I meant as being open source but yes it's in a separate repo with the API hosting product I built called M3O.com.

https://github.com/m3o/m3o https://github.com/micro/micro

> We encountered an error when trying to load your application and your page could not be served. Check the logs for your application in the App Platform dashboard.

Apologies. Having some platform issues.

ditto

This is really cool! Do you have plans to start charging for this service eventually or any premium offerings?

Thanks! Still figuring it out. I think it definitely has to make money somehow but too early to say how. First ideas were obvious ones but I think we might do something like charging for additional services within the chat e.g commands that give you news and weather information, real time events, etc.

Small issue:

Peak > Peek

Fixed

Show HN: Micro Chat – Private group chat