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Campfire

once.com

67 pointstosh29 comments

The idea of a simpler, less bloated Slack is definitely appealing to me as a user, but I'm not sure there's much of a market. What kind of companies are they targeting here? Small enough that user access dialog is usable and the lack of features/integrations is acceptable, but also willing to pay $300 and take on the trouble of self-hosting.

My biggest issue is with the UI though. Without watching the video I wouldn't know what half the buttons do. Many of them have multiple actions/states and there are no labels or tooltips for buttons.

Forms do have labels, but you have to click an icon to read them. It seems the only benefit of this is that you can also see what the label is in French, but unless you're translating the app, most users would prefer to just see the label in the language of their choice. And there are some dialogs where just English text is shown, so this isn't entirely consistent. Maybe I'm totally missing something here, but I think simply having a user select their preferred language isn't something that needed to be innovated away.

They did a live stream this morning and said they've already crossed the six figure mark on the initial private/soft launch. I was pretty surprised by that, as similarly I questioned the market.

My gut instinct was that this wouldn't compete with Slack, but with Element or Mattermost.

It is a shame that the only take on how to compete against Slack is on price. Nothing new and different seems to have been done to the product.

Campfire was originally launched way before Slack though.

Yes, but we are in 2024. Our expectations of products have changed, and especially after their fresh look on their email product, I hoped they had a new take on corporate chat as well.

If you take some of the public slack channels, campfire fits the better.

Look at Elixir's slack for example. Since it's a free tier, you can't view older messages that can be beneficial to someone. And Elixir's slack channel is not going to need fancy workflows, web hooks for CI, gitops capabilities et all.

Your expectations might have changed. Most users are quite happy with core chatting features. And in the case of Slack those features have become a bit too intrusive and disorganised, so that is one of the selling points of Campfire.

My main issue with this new Campfire thing is that since it's self-hosted, my boss can basically read all my chats with coworkers. Sure, Slack's priciest plan lets them do that too, but most Slack setups I've seen don't bother. Plus, Slack itself isn't as likely to snoop through my messages about pay raises or thinking about quitting, unlike my employer.

Idk this seems like a non-issue...Are people really having chats they shouldn't have via a work chat? I thought we knew better than that. I wouldn't trust ANY chat platform managed by my employer with those types of messages.

You'd be surprised how much private conversations are had on a work chat. And even if some conversations don't discuss anything critical, it could still be used against you somehow.

> my boss can basically read all my chats with coworkers.

What are you talking about that would be bad for your employer to hear to begin with? Non-work-related discussions should never happen on work machines.

Uh, any entity who operates a service and is responsible for managing its database can read your data. Slack's database engineers can read your chats too.

Yeah, I specifically addressed that in the post. Slack is not really that interested in me potentially thinking of leaving my employer or about me talking with a work friend about wanting to get a raise.

My employer might be.

Your employer can read your Slacks too

> Plus, Slack itself isn't as likely to snoop through my messages about pay raises or thinking about quitting, unlike my employer.

Slack absolutely has a way to export all data (including private direct messages), it's documented here: https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-worksp...

Since your employer would be the organization owner or admin of the Slack account that would allow them to check into everything that anyone has ever said.

Mattermost is better and free

Mattermost also supports Slack webhooks directly, which is a huge thing for integrations

It is not free, just the first tier.

Is it possible to construct a container like the one built for campfire but for something like GitLab or Mattermost?

Interesting that Campfire and Once brands doesn't build on 37signals' brand.

Official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39219912

Interesting. What I was most curious about are the backups of the database. Couldn't find any mention of it.

It’s SQLite. Maybe do a periodic rsync or S3.

how is this better than rocket.chat?

"without a subscription"

If you download and install Rocket.chat there's no subscription, like Campfire

https://www.rocket.chat/pricing

It does seem to have subscription tiers, it’s just that the first tier is free.

It’s also open source so you can self host.

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