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Comment by monooso | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little surprised nobody has mentioned Campfire [1].

It's open source, trivial to self-host, and can support an arbitrary number of rooms and users.

Sure, it doesn't have all of Discord's bells and whistles (for better or worse), but then neither do some of the alternatives mentioned in the article.

[1]: https://once.com/campfire

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I've been on the lookout for Discord alternatives for my friend group for a while, and this is the first one that really looks promising to me. All the others are too expensive (Mattermost, Rocket) or introduce too much friction (IRC, Matrix). This looks like it could work!

I've been running a campfire chat with a few hundred users for a couple of years now. It's one of my favorite pieces of software simply because I don't spend any time thinking about it.

Could you compare Campfire to alternatives in the article?

From DHHs company for those that matters to.

"After you checkout, we’ll email you a private download link that includes everything you need."

It used to be a paid product, now it's free. There's a clear link to the source code on GitHub [1], so you don't need to go through the "checkout".

[1]: https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire

The owner's terrible reputation, no mystery here.

You may of course choose not to use this software because you disagree with the personal politics of one of the creators, DHH.

However, the owner (37signals, not DHH) has an excellent reputation for producing high quality web applications since the early 2000s.

This is cool. Thanks for the shout.

Works great on a FreeBSD Linux VM. This is seriously cool.

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