the idea behind this project is to make a centralized decentralized platform for communication.
We have all used things like Discord, Slack, Mattermost and so on. There are gripes about all of them. If you combine all the gripes of all the Different platforms then you end up a with and effective roadmap in how to make a new platform that is better than all the other platforms combined.
Meet Hackerschat, the sum of all the gripes and designed to help move us into the new age of communication, communication evolved.
I am not going to buzz word you into oblivion, we hate that as much as you do. The executive summary is we will be using a combination of modified existing open source software and a custom expo app plus an extensive backend written in rust, gleam and elixir, plus and API set written in Go to make the communication platform for humans.
This is not going to be a cheap thing to pull off, so please consider donating! you can donate using one of the following links:
we also know that we are going to need some stuff, so like read so that you might be able to help us!
this is where we will list off the peeps that we would like to help us build this big ass project, we promise that it will be fast paced, fun, and life changing!
The mission of this project is rather simple. We have a map of what chat platforms have done, what they have not done, and what we need to do. We will use this map to build a platform that is able to be used for chatting, planning, business communication and support at the same time. Open source, transparent pricing and lot's of community imput to ensure that this is the best platform you have ever used.
We will be using a wide range of already established technology for a wide range of reasons.
- Expo
- Gleam
- Elixir
- Pheonix
- Tarui
- PostgreSQL
- Rust
- Nix
- Kubernetes
- Mattermost
- Disourse
- we believe that the grand majority of developer goals can be hit with this project in half or even a quarter of the time it normally takes if we exapand our map to include various other software projects that we like and think have a place in our ecosystem.
- we have plans on including things that can be compared to Discorse and Mattermost in our platform, and rather than reinventing the wheel we will be working with the existing tech stacks to enhance our products. We will also be using yarn/mastodon and the Twitter Algorithm to ensure that we can make our social aspects of the platform meet spec at the same speed as the rest of the platform.
- we love other open source software
our plans for the initial v1 release over the next few weeks is to implement all the features that are on the Discord platform plus a handful of our own changes listed below:
- built in modmail
- open source moderation framework
- a social home for announcements and discovery
- no weird requirements in our onboarding and applications system
- replace the traditional discord forum channels with actual Discourse backed forum technology
- implement libsignal on Direct Messages and Dave in Voice and media
- design mattermost akin internal channels for management
- add a system for volunteer moderation
- implement some of the ideas from experiments in Discord such as
- the notification system
- announcements composer
- implement a 3 tier premium offering for accounts
- the only difference between the tiers will be API access for account automation
- write an opinionated DSL for our APIs
- more added soon
we will be implementing a feature where all messages older than 60,90,or 180 days are deleted and converted into per community embeddings for per community ML training on auto moderation and behavioral analysis. We have a goal of maintaining a zero knowledge architecture for this so that the embeddings do not transfer any PII to the ML training. We will need to do expensive research on this to ensure that goal is achieved.
Some people who we work with and are helping us build this project:
