Comment by stryan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stryan | Hacker News Reader

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From a normie perspective:

- No screenshots on front page, I have no idea what it looks like

- no video chat, no screen sharing

- No downloadable version isn't a feature. What's a PWA?

- "Live audio space" doesn't explain whether it's drop-in voice channels like discord/slack huddles or scheduled audio calls

- The name makes it sound like a Discord clone

From a technical perspective:

- Not FOSS, can't self-host or federate. What makes this less likely to rug pull than Discord/any of the other alternatives

- No information on who is making this

- No information on how messages are encrypted

- Webpage looks vaguely AI generated

- Bot API is A) hidden at the bottom of the very long tutorial, B) seems to be limited to normal user actions (I could be wrong!), and C) desperately needs an index or sidebar

- Unclear whether anonymous channels are truly anon or just anon on the client side

Some stuff seems neat: I am intrigued by anonymous channels and from your feature table it hits more table-stakes features than most Discord alternatives. But I would give it a few touch ups if you want it to stand out.

Thanks for checking it out and taking the time to give feedback. You made some good points. After staring at the site for so long, you go blind to these types of things, so you're helping a lot here.

>no video chat, no screen sharing

Screen sharing and video chat were added just a few days ago, and I wanted to get that tested more before mentioning it so prominently.

>No downloadable version isn't a feature. What's a PWA?

At the moment, we're a small team, and not all engineers. None of us know Swift or Kotlin, but aren't against learning. Usage is something we want to see before investing that much time into writing these, so in the meantime, a PWA is the best middle ground.

One key differentiator from Discord is that we're not against third party clients, so if in the meantime someone comes out with one we're not going to make any efforts to stop it.

>The name makes it sound like a Discord clone

I see what you mean, if you had a magic wand, what would you call it?

>"Live audio space" doesn't explain whether it's drop-in voice channels like discord/slack huddles or scheduled audio calls

We have video now, but to answer directly, it's similar to a Space on X.

Thank you for the feedback, I will be working this weekend to make these things better articulated on the website!

Glad you're taking it in-stride, I was worried I was a little too direct. Everyone and their mom is making a Discord competitor these days but being Not-Discord isn't enough to stand out.

> I see what you mean, if you had a magic wand, what would you call it?

Naming things is, of course, the hardest part of programming so somewhat hypocritically I can't say I have an answer :) . It probably depends more on what you view your target audience as and what your main selling point is. Discord worked as a name since it falls in line with a lot "gamer branding". If you have a theme going on I'd go with that, otherwise the age old traditions of picking a random communication related or mashing two words together (Linphone, Threema, Skype, etc) are probably the easiest.

Personally I think I'd go with "Microcosm" or something similar. Sounds cool, abbreviates well to just "micro". Or maybe something with "vox" in it. Honestly it probably doesn't matter too much, people will get used to saying anything.

>Glad you're taking it in-stride, I was worried I was a little too direct.

Quite the contrary, this is the advice we needed.

>Everyone and their mom is making a Discord competitor these days

We did a significant amount of research into this and didn't find any contenders. Which services do you see that are competitors in the same space?

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