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Show HN: Everchat 1.0 – Build your community in the fastest way ever

20 points| erikfiala | 5 years ago |everch.at

45 comments

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[+] pmontra|5 years ago|reply
Did anybody try selling a service like this:

Your our own instance of Mattermost, Discord, or any well know service like those. We manage it for you on our servers, keep it running and up to date. You have admin access to the web app, not to the server. Pay per seat? You can get a db dump at any time and start it over somewhere else.

Basically it's what we get from Slack but we would really own the data. We must trust the service provider but those machines are already in somebody's else cloud, so not a big change.

[+] agnivade|5 years ago|reply
Mattermost has their cloud offering now!

It's basically Mattermost in Cloud with everything else remaining same. You don't get raw access to the database, but you can get an effective dump of your data any time.

[+] ALittleLight|5 years ago|reply
I like the concept, here is my feedback:

* Moving around is clumsy. If I'm in a channel, it's hard to know how to get back out or to the previous menus without hitting the back button.

* I tried to upload a gif and it just hung without responding. Not sure if the gif ever went through but I eventually got bored of waiting. If it was working - maybe a progress bar on uploading?

* Obviously spam is already a problem. The popular communities list, and the new communities list, are just people mashing their keyboards to create test communities.

* Channel title length needs to be limited. (See the channels with huge names that are ruining the "New Channels" page)

* How does "No censorship" work in terms of malicious content, spam, pornography, etc? If it works like it sounds, I'm not sure I'd like to browse it. Do I really want to see gifs of animals being tortured, shocksite images, etc. People self-promoting and trying to sell things - if people used it wouldn't this be a huge part of the content?

* How would you fall on the subreddits that reddit banned - e.g. jailbail, fatpeoplehate, racist groups? Communities that are not quite illegal, but clearly toxic. Doesn't it seem like by enabling such people to get together and coordinate you are helping to promote toxic behavior?

* The website became non-responsive for me at least once and I had to kill the tab. Looks like it was waiting on firebasestorage googleapis. A better failure mode let me know something had gone wrong, or load as much as possible, without just crashing the tab.

[+] erikfiala|5 years ago|reply
Thanks for the feedback!

You brought up very good points and yes, we are concerned with the same problem you're bringin up. In the future, we want communities to self-police themselves, but for that, people on Everchat need adequate tools, which we haven't even start building yet.

The issue of non-responsivity became apparent when someone (2 hours into launch) tried to crash the site with the unlimited title length :D This should already be hotfixed, so the waiting times shouldn't be that long! :)

[+] erikfiala|5 years ago|reply
Hello hackers! Everchat is finally here!

During the past year, we were working hard on making Everchat happen. Today, we're proud to present you with the first public version of it!

We're looking forward to seeing what channels you'll create, what topics you'll talk about, and what we can improve and build to make Everchat better for you.

Features in this launch:

  - Account creation
  - Your and others' profiles
  - Create a public channel
  - Create a thread
  - Reply
  - Upvote and downvote
  - @mention, #hashtag, !channel
  - Earn karma
  - Channel members overview
  - Share (copy link)
  - Search (channels and people)
  - Email notifications

If you have any feature requests, just reach out to us via the https://everch.at/feature-requests channel.

If you want to leave any other feedback, let us know here in the comment section below, contact us via email or Twitter, or the best way is to tell us in the https://everch.at/feedback channel.

[+] pgt|5 years ago|reply
From the About page (https://everch.at/about):

> "We promise never to give any of your private or personally identifiable information to 3rd parties."

>"Everchat is censorless, but we reserve rights to take down any subject to criminal activity."

How will you reconcile privacy with the "Basic human right of Internet freedom" and takedown requests from authoritarian governments against dissidents who break local speech laws?

How will you handle NSFW posts?

According to the Terms & Conditions (https://everch.at/legal), Everchat JSA is governed by the laws of Slovakia, but I am not familiar with Slovakian free speech laws and liability for platforms.

[+] mathnmusic|5 years ago|reply
Why create a new app instead of simply running a matrix.org server instance?
[+] underlines|5 years ago|reply
Hi Erik,

The app looks clean and useful. It's a no-bullshit approach to a digital free speech space. Could be useful for example in my country of choice: I live in Thailand and we have a democracy movement that faces real threats form the monarchy and government.

I read your legal docs. They are pretty clear from what I understand. What's not so clear to me are 3 things:

1. How does everchat protect me? I am in Thailand and breaking local laws like talking about the Monarchy can land me in Jail or void my Visa and Work permit.

2. I thought an Impressum is mandatory in GDPR, it looks a bit shady to me, having an app and not seeing an Impressum with a real address and company name.

3. What's everchat's buisness model, and how are you gonna make money? (If part of this includes using my personal data, I am fine with it, as long as I exactly understand how you gonna use it.)

[+] 3np|5 years ago|reply
The three main pitch headlines under "About":

> Basic human right: We at Everchat believe that Internet freedom is one of our and our users’ fundamental human rights.

> Data anonymity: We promise never to give any of your private or personally identifiable information to 3rd parties.

> No censorship: Everchat is censorless, but we reserve rights to take down any subject to criminal activity.

Given the values you communicate, what (apart from pinky promises) do you do differently to assure users that these are fulfilled? How do you avoid making yourselves a SPoF?

Is the protocol open? Can I self-host? Will sources be made available and if so under what license?

[+] nextaccountic|5 years ago|reply
Is this something like a reddit clone?
[+] kevsim|5 years ago|reply
For my startup [0] we have a slack community where we ask people to come engage with us and give us feedback on the product and how it can work better for them. We love it. Teams usually want their own private channel so they can discuss things more openly with us, post screenshots that may have stuff they don't want spread around publicly (we're a product management tool/issue track so teams has sensitive stuff stored with us). The only issue we have is some people have a lot of slack workspaces already and don't want to add yet another (which is totally understandable coming from a guy with 10 or so Slack workspaces right now).

Does Everchat have ambitions to be this kind of private community where companies can interact with their users, etc or is the target something else?

0: https://kitemaker.co, the super fast, hotkey-driven product management tool/issue tracker that has deep integrations to GitHub, Figma, Slack, etc.

[+] protoduction|5 years ago|reply
Have you considered something like Discourse[0] for this usecase, or are you looking for something more minimal? I'm trying to understand the usecase better.

[0]: https://www.discourse.org/

[+] erikfiala|5 years ago|reply
Thanks for the feedback! Yes, we're looking into this usecase. We're planning to create private communities, where only people with token have access to. And later on, expand on the concept of threading. How does that sound?
[+] pcmill|5 years ago|reply
Your landing page does not really tell me anything about this product. Why should I join? What can you do on Everchat?
[+] geoah|5 years ago|reply
Amazing work :D Do keep it up!

Couple of notes:

    - Loving the UI.
    - Home should say what is everchat, features, differentiating factors.
    - Peek into "popular channels" without login.
    - Sign up email comes from a random firebase domain, not the same as the welcome.
    - Haven't managed to post a comment, getting 500 on a `s?l=dataLayer` resource (chrome macOS).
    - Ability to enable notifications (email and/or html5) on specific channels.
    - A monthly or so email about new features, stats, or changes would be nice. I don't think I'd use it right now but if it managed to get traction I'd be up for it.
    - Maybe: Invite only rooms? Discord style.
[+] erikfiala|5 years ago|reply
Sorry everyone,

we had to go into a temporary maintenance mode right now, because we had too much load and we weren’t ready for it. We'll update you as soon as we're up and running again.

Btw, I'm reading all the feedback, and it's highly appreciated!

[+] chrismorgan|5 years ago|reply
Is this why the entire site is not working? I’m just getting a blank screen once I run it in a JavaScript-enabled environment (without which I get “You need to enable JavaScript to run this app.”).
[+] riantogo|5 years ago|reply
The website doesn't load. I was curious to see it in action. From what is described in the comments it sounds similar to my covid side project https://discoflip.com (not quiet ready yet, but if you had any words of advice it would be great to hear)
[+] kevsim|5 years ago|reply
Had a few issues creating a new channel:

- filled in the new channel form

- had to sign up

- put in email. woops that was the login form. Clicked log in, email disappeared

- refilled form, got email. Email says "evechat" not "everchat"

- followed link. channel wasn't created, had to do it again

[+] erikfiala|5 years ago|reply
Thanks for the "evechat" issue lol, just fixed it.

And yeah this flow sucks. We'll be looking into it ASAP, as many people already struggled with it.

Thanks!! <3

[+] fredley|5 years ago|reply
I put in my email address and hit 'sign up'. It cleared my email address so I had to put it in again. It then went to another screen where I had to put in a username, and my email address _again_!
[+] fredley|5 years ago|reply
While I'd use this, how do I persuade (less privacy conscious) others to join this instead of a Facebook Group on the platform they're already on?
[+] dancemethis|5 years ago|reply
It says it's to build a community, but I don't see the source code anywhere.

If the platform is proprietary, it is oppressive - and therefore there is no community. Just prisoners sharing a cell.

[+] tomtompl|5 years ago|reply
The magic link to login doesnt work
[+] retrofuturism|5 years ago|reply
The magic link invited me to log in to my EveChat account. I was disappointed to find out nobody was talking about Eve Online.
[+] Sirikon|5 years ago|reply
> We promise never to give any of your private or personally identifiable information to 3rd parties.

Promises mean nothing nowadays.

[+] Cthulhu_|5 years ago|reply
Nope, I'd like to see that claim encoded in strict legalese, along with open source code, public pentest results, and a secure way to report found security (= data breach) issues.

But the strict legalese isn't going to happen because it would only take one data breach for the company to be destroyed by lawsuits. There's always a clause in there somewhere.

[+] tonyjstark|5 years ago|reply
What is the monetization for the platform? As soon as ads play a role, the promise is broken.