SAMA – open-source Chat server
github.com
github.com
> … provide an alternative solution to the wide spread XMPP messaging protocol (and to be honest — the only wide spread ‘standard’ these days).
Did they miss Matrix for some reason? The spec is at https://spec.matrix.org/latest/
The beauty of IRC is its brutally spartan simplicity.
Because it raises the bar for community participation. Running their own community sounds ideal, but that assumes someone interested in testing the software out and participating in their community would be willing to create a new account on their platform first. I probably wouldn’t create an account just to participate, whereas I already have a Discord account and joining their Discord community doesn’t require too much from me. Plus, nothing stops them from still working to build a community on their platform anyway.
realistically though, i've heard "bespoke, artisanal software" before, so, probably.
Linux supports my 9-year-old PC just fine. But once you move outside "last two stable versions of Chrome or Firefox" some websites quit working. Since I only have 16GB of RAM, some hungry apps can't run at the same time.
We've all heard it before, I don't need to say it again. "Modern" means "Pay more to run faster on a shorter treadmill, or we'll shame you"
If it means “we’ve been doing this a long time, we’re up to date, and we had no compatibility burden”, that’s probably coming out really nice.
If it means “tryhard at buzzword bingo”, you know how that’s going. Claude is fucking retarded and it can do that.
Meanwhile, serious developers with a proven track record who ship and care about stability and longevity understand that boring technology is best.
https://github.com/SAMA-Communications/sama-server/tree/main... https://github.com/SAMA-Communications/xmpp-adapter
Also I don't see anything about E2EE support
Right now, for example there is another company called Nango calling themselves open source and yet for the life of me I cannot see how to self host.
This is such a disgrace to the open source community and really goes against the hacker ethos.
I really wish YC stops funding those types of companies.
SAMA seems more alike to Slack, where channels is the main grouping, and threads just happen to be a thing you can create in channels.
Mattermost does it the best imo: "threads" in mattermost are just reply chains that go in the main channel, and you can open them separately too.
Besides Matrix's whole matrix-y-ness (lol been using it 4 years, still have E2EE problems REGULARLY), they also completely, completely fumbled threads. Sadly, Zulip has no ecosystem, and the near universal gut reaction to it's UX is "eww". All around, just a god damn travesty.
And in the Discords I am on it's a disaster too. Every time a beginner uses one it cuts the chance of getting help by a lot. You basically have to get lucky that the first person who responds will solve it, otherwise you're out of luck.
For me they are the reason I use Slack. They allow us to have a meaningful conversation and not overlook anything important and at the same time allow interested people to dive into more detailed discussions. For comparison, I use Teams for another project and this is madness - people actively avoid discussion in order not to force the other team members to spend too much time scrolling the screen, and search is abysmal. (Note I'm using these for work, maybe if it was for other types of communication I might not care.)
How do you know though? Because...
> and at the same time allow interested people to dive into
Discussions often start out one way and then go off to something else. People can't know ahead of time if they should dive in or not. That's one of the problems.
If you're looking for what a platform made around threads/topics could be, then probably Zulip is the most mature and useful solution around today.
It does keep it neater but also doesn’t include or invite others into it as easily.
I’ve seen another presentation of chat where the latest few messages are shown threaded in-line inder the message. If it’s a message I’ve clicked into before, it remembers and shows me more of the thread in line.
I think slack could do this well but would be happier if mattermost or something had it first :)
If IRC were the only option, its inflexibility would warrant a new protocol, but XMPP is in such a good position with how malleable and deliberately extensible it is. Common gripes all have XEPs, hard stuff like E2EE and Jingle have a huge headstart over greenfield projects, we've got standard compatibility featuresets of XEPs to help with fragmentation, there's a well-founded independent governance structure for the project. It just needs investment and focus to push all this stuff over the edge and get implemented/adopted.
It's hard work. It's harder than starting fresh. But a better XMPP is more valuable than the 20th custom chat app re-implementing the same features as the other 19.
I'm not knocking this project in particular, this is a more general comment about the IM ecosystem, spurred by their blog post mentioning XMPP.
Update: downvotes, really? what's wrong with IRC?