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Comment by AgentME | Hacker News Reader

The number one thing I'm looking for in an open-source Skype alternative is persistent group chats with history (so when you sign in, you're still in the same group chats you were, and the history of messages that were sent in that chat while you were gone are sent to you). I'm baffled that this seemingly necessary thing is such a rare feature, and I'd be all over this project if it gets this.

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We thought the exact same thing, so we're creating Matrix [1]! It supports all sorts of things, but especially public/private group chats with multiple device support. We're basically a team of people who use IRC all day, so we really do feel your pain :)

[1] http://matrix.org

irssi in tmux on a cheap VPS.

I know this might sound snarky, but this is the combination a lot of my peers and I use.

I'm wary of the "yet another proprietary new messenger", all of which are only compatible with themselves. I can not understand why none of them implement protocols all the messengers can agree upon like for example tent.io, remoteStorage or ZeroNet.

Distributed messaging is hard and a lot of people are giving it a try, leaving us with lots of different half baked walled gardens. Yes, I'm looking at you, threema, telegram and your friends...

I have approximately zero chance of getting all of my friends and family to set up their own VPSs and tmux and irssi so I can chat with them.

My senior project is this. We plan to open source it in a bit after the semester ends. You can try it out here: https://projectdefero.com/

I'll probably make a Show HN post once we open source it.

TextSecure has encrypted group chats. If there's any downsides there, I'd be curious to hear what they are.

Easier said than done

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