Mildly reminds me how being online on AIM or ICQ was an actual invitation to chat. I had so many interesting conversations with people I barely knew.
There's no source of that signal that someone is open to chitchat these days, and it's in my opinion kind of killed what was once great about online communication.
This is something I've always wanted to write about, and I imagine that someday I'll end up with a long article, but basically, it's the idea that the internet used to be offline by default, and now it's online by default.
People used to be offline by default. You had to “connect to the internet.” Open MSN, go into forums and check the latest unread messages, come back from a concert and manually upload the photos to your Fotolog or wherever. Now it's the opposite. We are online by default. The expectation is that we're always connected and respond quickly. Going to a sports event or a concert? You have to post a story to Instagram from that very place, not when you get home. Someone sends you an email or a WhatsApp message? You’re expected to reply as soon as possible.
That’s what I miss most about the internet—the idea and the feeling that I would go online when I wanted to, not that I lived inside the internet 24/7.
I have a theory: what was scarce once, is not anymore.
Social networks make people tired/satisfied/overwhelmed of "interacting online", and in the worst possible way: passively, not producing anything and just consuming it.
Yeah, and the channels that are available... well, here's an example. I'm a member of a couple of professional WhatsApp groups... both of which are so notification heavy that I've permanently muted them, and therefore never visit and as a result derive no benefit from. And, at least for me, there's something about WhatsApp that makes it unamenable to the kind of dip in and out interaction you used to get with IM services. I want to be there when I'm there and not disturbed when I'm not.
I remember the early days of Skype and Google talk, calling random strangers and… actually having a conversation with them. I remember they were always confused and surprised to get a random call from a stranger, but were almost always happy to chat anyway!
Huh, coming from an IRC and email background I have the opposite reaction. Rather than having to wait until someone is online it is much nicer to just type to them and they'll respond once they can. Everyone is open all the time!
Disagree. There are people open to chitchat right now. They are just young. We just grew old, most of us are having families, and it would be weird to idly chitchat instead of playing your family role.
Discord indicates who's online with the green dot.
It can be modified to never show you're online, or show 'away' or something, but it's similar. It also displays how many are online in a channel on a server, and then you can open the list.
Despite that, however, it still feels 'different' to how it was, but I think we're also 'different'. Being (significantly) older now I have more responsibilities and pressures for my time so I'm less likely (like zero chance) to be sitting idle waiting for random chats.
We'd have to ask those who are, now, the age we were then - but then they also have no frame of reference. My son is often chatting to his friends online, but I think they're exclusively friends from meatspace rather than electronic strangers.
Would anyone still use a desktop-only (no mobile) messenger where you have to run/turn on intentionally (not always-on like most mobile-first messengers nowadays), lists online/offline friends the way AIM/ICQ did, and you can only send messages with online friends?
I get that most leisure computing has moved off of desktop to mobile in modern days, but there's definitely enough of us nerds who're on a computer a lot (even if just for work, if nothing else). It can't be any less than in the late 1990s when ICQ was popular.
Now that I think about it, that's true. The same of IRC and MSN Messenger. Since being online all the time was not the default state of things, people only turned those applications (or even their computers) on when they actually wanted to chat to other people. When you saw your friend online on one of those, you immediately wrote something to them, even if you didn't really have anything to say, because what was the point of having the application on otherwise?
Inreally enjoyed that, especially on ICQ. My first real job was a night operations role at a reservation services company, managing incidents and doing database maintenance work.
There was alot of waiting involved, and I would chat on icq with a lot of random people in Europe. I ended up meeting one person!
The problem is… people are people and do nasty things. I have a good friend who is a few years younger. She found herself on the “information superhighway” at 13-14, blue collar parents who had no idea what she was doing alone on AIM or what that was. She find herself meeting this charming guy… who happened to be in his 30’s.
Learning about how common that was was very sobering… as this thing that represented fun and friends to me ended up being malevolent to many.
Yeah, I've thought this for a while now. It's like it used to be you either were available to chat or you weren't, but now it's like everyone is half-available at all times. I agree with other commenters that the fact that you had to be sitting at a desktop was also a factor. Finishing what you were doing and logging into AIM (or taking down your away message) was the equivalent of opening your door, going into the lounge/breakroom, etc. --- a signal of openness to interaction.
I might relate to this, but I also spent more time talking to friends on the phone 20 years ago. The perception of this greatness can't be disentangled from the experience of youth.
My group of friends gets something really close to OP, because of our music bot (Which only pings everyone on specific events, like the music queue running out, uncommon enough that it doesn't get annoying, and never more than once a session)
There are a billion communities using discord and telegram to do basically what you’re describing - topic rooms, hangout rooms, you can change your online status to signal your willingness to ge sociable.
Our friend group's social contract is to sit in a discord channel (even if empty) if you're open to chatting. Unfortunately we have no real equivalent for text.
well part of it was there wasnt ^{10}10 = 10^{10^{10^{10^{10^{10^{10^{10^{10^{10}}}}}}}}} more interesting things than chatting with your friends to do online
> I also had this idea to turn this into an IoT device that has 5 RGB lights and sits on your desk. It would light up when each friend you have delegated joins your Discord voice channel and you could customize the colour for each friend. If I get some traction I might turn it into a real product, so email me at my email address in my about page if that seems something you'd like.
Hah, I'm also building something like this for notification purposes. My wife's tablet sometimes doesn't show notifications and she's often not near her phone, so I ordered some ESP32's and LED boards[0]. Going to scatter them around the house and link them to a switch in Home Assistant so I can light them up if I need to get a hold of her. I'm planning a back-and-forth scan effect to make sure they're eye-catching, already named them Cylons.
My partner is disabled, and my home office is far enough from the bedroom/her work desk that I sometimes can't hear her when she could use, wants, or needs help. These very different priorities make messaging me difficult for her sometimes, not to mention that I can't know what the urgency is if she messages me over SMS/Signal/etc.
As a result, we were looking into a very similar system where we each have an LED signboard, speaker, and priority lights on the top of a small device that lives on top of our monitors along with an app where she can select "not urgent, but you should know", "when you have a moment", "as soon as you can", and "urgent, right now" in an app, with an optional message, and the device makes a tone and lights the lights associated with the most recent, highest priority message as well as reminding every five minutes.
I'm playing with an ESP32 right now to implement, but it's nice to see that the entire concept isn't entirely unprecidented.
I've not looked at this space - but with flexible control software, such devices could serve a very wide variety of use cases. And perhaps multiple uses cases simultaneously, far less intrusively than dealing with a variety of alarm & alert systems.
While this is a pretty cool hardware project, I would be quite annoyed to be your partner. No offense, but it almost reads as satire that you want to flash LEDs in every corner of the house if your wife doesn't look at her phone notifications quickly enough.
I think Discord is the best chat app for friend groups and it's not even close. At this point I've written the following bots specifically for my friend group's server:
# Music Quiz Bot
Existing apps work ok. A lot of paid and don't let you use a specific Spotify playlist.
The only thing annoying about this one is that none of the Discord API wrappers handle audio very well so I've found that this one gets a bit flaky if you're trying to play a lot.
This one is probably like 500 lines of Typescript but a lot of that is for the Spotify API. The game logic is pretty minimal.
# Birthday Bot
This is like 10 lines of Python. It's a cron that reads from a Google Sheet my friends and I keep up to date with personal information. If it's someone's birthday then it'll post a happy birthday message to them.
# Plex Bot
I wrote this before I discovered that Overseerr just has this built-in. My Plex was set up with a webhook to hit whenever new media was downloaded. The bot would post to a specific thread with the metadata about the new media. This included another webserver for serving the cover art from the private Plex metadata server.
# Movie Quiz Bot
Similar to the music bot although I don't think existing apps exist that do this. Essentially it's https://framed.wtf/ except as a game in a Discord channel where random frames are pulled from movies in my media library and everyone competes to name the movie first. This one required some ffmpeg fun to make pulling the stills not take forever. I considered doing static stills or having a cronjob do it, but it's more fun when it's completely random.
I'm 32 and Discord is the harbinger of getting out of touch with technology for me. It is clearly a great service, because so many people use it and seem happy with it, but it is _not_ for me. And I wish that wasn't the case because Discord is pretty much _the_ spot for the communities I'd like to hang around with.
But I wasn't able to get on top of its notification system or get past the gamer heavy UI.
Does your friend group consist of mainly techies? If not, I am impressed you were able to get them to use it. Even more so if they were already on it. I tried to get folks to use Signal with me for a bit and it was the most futile endeavor I've ever attempted.
The problem is that Discord isn’t e2ee and logs all chats in plaintext for all time, including all DMs. This makes it a nonstarter for me; friends don’t serve as honey in the surveillance trap for communication with their friends.
Nothing that builds up an ever-growing surveillance database on private conversations between friends can be in the running for “best”.
These all sound like a lot of fun. I've built a few discord bots myself as I've run a few online communities.
1) Reminder bot for scheduled events.
We're all working adults who all played games as teens together . To actually get us together, we schedule our favorite games for once a month to play for a few hours. We all often forget when they start, so my bot posts a 2 week, 1 week 3 days, and 2 hour notice.
2) RCON bot
I run a TF2 server and a Minecraft server. You can manage both via RCON commands via slash commands in Discord. Also the tf2 one monitors player activity and alerts if players are in the server
3. Private server API bot
I founded a private game server for a game that ended service in 2023. The bot reads from our API to make a central list of lobbies and status. It also creates voice channels for each public lobby.
It's also used to help grant items and other admin commands.
4. For April Fools, I made a snarky bot that responded to random messages. It was backed by Gemini.
These have all been fun and novel to make but I've never found a great way to productize them and make money from any of them. Wonder if you've found any avenues there.
Not only Discord is not private, it’s looks, feels, and interacts bloated - extremely bloated. Sometimes I am forced to use it and I am almost constantly disgusted in those durations. Luckily around where I live “friend groups” are still far from Discord.
Going from signal to discord is crazy. How can you be OK with knowing that your personal voice chats are being monitored, recorded and sold to the next highest bidder? How can it be so easy to choose convenience over that? Or is it that we have essentially given up and wanna actively take a part in mass surveillance?
Not every decision is about opsec. If, for what you're doing, you want people to be alerted about your actions without your explicit say-so, then signal is not the tool for that job.
Shame on discord for having a lousy privacy stance, but most people aren't on signal for the privacy, most people are on signal because that's where their friends are (and one or two of those friends is there for the privacy).
The trade-off here is a social connections versus privacy/integrity.
I can make the decision to use Signal or whatever, but as long as my whole social circle does not do the same, it wont be useful. And since when they do the swap, they have to convince their whole social circle to do the same, this becomes an impossible task. Either you have 10 different apps for different friends that lie on different places on the ethics of privacy, or you just take the easy way out and use what everyone uses.
Man. Reminds me when many years back I had about 10 friends collaborating on a movie and I needed something between asynchronous and synchronous, so I stripped Wordpress down to just titles and little avatars on a front page feed thing.
About 2 years later Twitter came out and I was like "oh, I guess I was on to something." :)
"Scheduling" can become a four-letter word when it comes to adults organizing for game nights. In many groups game night rarely seems to rise to the formality of scheduling sports with organized practice/play sessions.
It's nice to hear that this group found a way to maintain the spontaneity.
TIL about "four-letter word" as an ESL speaker. If anyone else is confused about the linguistic compression algorithm that squeezes "scheduling" into just four letters, the magic is, of course, profanity! And "four-letter word" seems to be a polite way of saying something is or can become a PITA.
I didn't see this in the article, but why not just organize the games in a Discord text channel? Discord has very granular notifications that seem the perfect solution here, so folks can see there are unread messages in #games, and the folks gaming are already on the server.
One big noisy chat for everything is an antipattern, as any group of sufficient size eventually learns.
This was going to be my next idea if the bot didn't go well! For unread messages in Discord, you have to actively go into the discord app to check it. The fact that the bot only sends a notification when someone has taken the action to jump into discord signals that you're ready to chat right now. It avoids the 'I'll be on in 30ish', where in reality that might not happen. Talk is cheap.
The discord of '22 was, iirc, very different from now, or at least the culture around it. It looks like they just only used it for a single voice chat lobby
I completely disagree. The point is the impact it has on lives, not the tools used to build it. I would enjoy it if more people focused their writing on the impact their work has on people, and less on the tools and processes used. Or at the very least, clearly delineate the build from the impact.
I love the Idea. And i would adopt the solution if i didn't already have one.
Personally, in my circle of friends, we use slack (at first the free plan and now a payed plan).
During the pandemic we moved to the payed plan, because of the restriction on members in huddles/calls (and also because we want endless history and our own encryption keys).
Currently we have Game (D&D e.g.), PP and Small-talk channels that we use to have huddles that everyone can join.
Mostly we create other channels on demand to organise things. Or share knowledge, music and so on.
One nice feature with slack is, that you can receive notification if a huddle starts in a channel, also on mobile, if you have the app.
I don't know how often we use this notifications to join the small-talk channel. Personally, i join them every other week because i get notified.
PS: If someone from slack reads this, please do a friends plan, something between the free and pro plan :)
Reminds me of our Teamspeak Server, that we have already running for over 2 decades. Not only for playing games but more for just come online and hang out, quietly sitting next to each other, "lurking". We do this almost every evening, someone is always there. Probably couldn't live without it T.T.
This was a fun read. Being experienced in various methods of self hosting, it was cool to learn of coolify. Seeing more people get into self hosting always makes me happy.
If folks don't want to understandably install the discord app perhaps notifications could be sent through something like ntfy. Like create a dedicated channel for notifications for this and have the interested people subscribe to it. Can't say for sure if the discord.py library will allow for something like this but I think it should be possible.
Please, fix the contrast of the clicked links and your background. The discord.py link is unreadable. Same with supabase and coolify. Those I'm sure I haven't visited.
This comment is so interesting because clearly, it's the unvisited color that's broken, you know this, and you even typed it out, but it is so common for visited links to be darker than unvisited links that it makes you assume the opposite.
Wow so cool, I feel like if I had a light near by desk that turned on every time a friend was on discord voice, I'd be so much more likely to hop in for a few minutes over getting an notification. Something about the physical affordance feels harder to ignore
Check out Philips Hue or Govee lights with IFTTT integration - they can already do exactly this with Discord webhooks, no need to build it from scratch.
I always try to solve problems by using what people already have, so I wonder if having another group on Signal, where only “I'm playing!” messages would be allowed, couldn't fix the issue…?
I think it was the fact that actions spoke louder than words for us. It’s easy to say “I’ll jump on” but then you get distracted and then 30 mins later you go online. Similarly to when people say “leaving now” and then they start getting ready to leave. Because we are notified that someone has taken the action of going online they are 100% available to chat or play a game.
I’ve always thought this way and it’s amazing what applications and problems you can solve or replace with text files (csv, TXT, md), calendars (shared) and email. If I had to estimate, 80-90%?
I always believed in the power of simple tools and don’t reinvent the wheel.
My friend group has multiple Signal chats for different purposes. One is a general chat, no politics allowed. Then there's a chat that is for politics. One is for live music, and there are other sub-groups for specific interests.
Fun story. This reminds me of the summer my friends and I were all still around our small town — we used the Yo! app the same way, as a bat signal to meet up and get into nonsense. Someone would start Yo!ing and then once there was a critical mass of return Yo!s we'd switch to text/phone and link up.
> Over the next year, our group chat (in Signal) was drowning in notifications. A mix of general chit chat, talks on the ever changing news of COVID and the most important - when can people play games and chat. It really annoyed me when people would post on "hey anyone wanna play [game] in 15 mins?", for it to be buried in another 5 messages.
My friend group's solution to this problem is...lots of different group chats. They're all on Google Chat, but we have tons of different ones for different topics: bikes, space, covid/infectious diseases, baking, craft, plants, wildlife, true crime, politics, depressing news, renewables/sustainability, tech geekery, board games, home improvement...
I do miss video chat nights during lockdown though.
The only time I've seen this feature be used is when my grandma accidentally turns it on in the family groupchat - I just don't wanna hang out with my friends in WhatsApp
This reminds me a lot of the days when we would just hang in ventrillo and teamspeak to just hang out even when not playing games. Especially around the time when communities gathered around dedicated servers were still a thing. Miss those days :(
I had the idea of making a website where anyone of a group of friends can post their evening plans - go to trivia, play tennis, etc - and others would be able to sign up to join.
Never made it but glad to see these things can work.
> it was a life savior when my little one was a newborn to jump onto Discord for even 5 minutes to chat with my friends, watch someone play a game and then log off for another diaper change
I'm afraid I can't relate to this at all. I may a bit older and/or I may have less close friends but I prefer a very different kind of social contact that is more like make plans, meet up, rinse and repeat.
Back in the AIM/ORC days I loathed being pinged all the time for chit chat - this system reminds me of that!
I have several chat groups with friends and even with my wife to avoid this topic. With my wife, I have several now: one to share recipes, one to share the weeks meal plan, one to talk about the activities of our two year old and one to share houses we might be interested in buying.
It’s great to separate for record keeping, but mostly to avoid forcing the conversation on some organisational thing when the other just needs eg to vent about something at work
This is great. For years I’ve been wanting to solve the “link problem” in my Signal group. My friends post a ton of great links that get lost in the scrollback and I’d love a way to get just a dedicated queue. I’ve thought about things like a private subreddit or even just a different link group; but everything just felt like moving the problem and change management. Great to see this type of solution worked for you!
I think Signal should just create a pin option like how discord and a lot of others have.
But in the meantime if I had to genuinely suggest a method without any friction if you are okay with using code like the author did, then I'd suggest something and lemme know what you think
Why don't you just create a special emoji that would only be used for the purposes of Pin, like (Oh the irony), and then have a signal cli or signal-bot https://github.com/signal-bot/signal-bot where you could do something like /pins and it would show the pins but you would need a different mobile number or account for that and honestly just a big hassle. I could think of other ways but we would never reach the native User experience that signal could provide if it would allow pin natively
EDIT: Even a more simpler way could be if we could just search the chat emojis and we could just search <the pin emoji> and it would show it
i built the same thing (though only the notifier, not all the stat tracking) for my friend group back in 2017 when PUBG came out and we were trying to play together as often as we could. can confirm it worked great.
i eventually moved the bot to glitch.com (rip) where we could collaborate on it and it evolved into a monster of in jokes and utilities. it's going offline this week unless i can find the time to migrate it off glitch
There is a very weird display bug on this site : when I access it in lanscape horizontal position, with my iPhone 8 on Brave or Safari : all the text is trembling, unable to settle on a size. Trapped in a resizing loop. If I rotate the phone verically it settles properly and then also horizontally. But if I reload the page (horizontally) it goes nuts again :)
I really like this idea, especially the music quiz and birthday reminder. I've been wanting to build a bot for my friend group that shows up now and then when things go quiet, just to gently remind us of something warm. It doesn’t interrupt anyone, but quietly adds a bit of connection to the group.
I have a similar friend group that hangs out on discord now due to the post college diaspora and we even use a Signal group chat. However, it sounds like it's a smaller group, because we've taken to literally sending bat signal gifs into the chat when someone gets online and it works well enough for us :)
This is really interesting as a way to keep people connected on a regular basis. I wonder if something similar could be done for groups who aren't necessarily into gaming: like say a "virtual fireplace" where folks could just pop into a call and talk
Discord is already like that for a lot of niche communities and fandoms that aren't necessarily gaming; it just all evolved on a gaming-focused platform.
Interesting. But in my experience, the Australian need for daily social interaction with a group of peers - preferably including some sort of large alcoholic beverage - is quite a bit above average. Not sure how a group of Americans would respond.
I’m confused about what this solution does. I’d expect that as people move to discord all the message spam that was happening in signal would just eventually move over to discord as people got used to communicating there instead of signal
You don't get hundreds of messages per day by writing in email style. You get there if you have a lot of synchronous or near-synchronous communication in chat. It's kind of obvious that voice call suits this better, but there is friction involved in making an actual call.
Discord voice channel might reduce the friction if you make this culture of hopping in and out of it.
Discord was originally a place to organize for playing videogames with people. If you're using it for that purpose, you're probably on your computer already (because that's where the games are). Thus, the mobile app ends up being more for checking in with your community while away from the computer, rather than a primary driver of your engagement with the platform.
They could have been using it in browser. One of discords underrated decisions is that the browser version is fully featured and doesn't force you to download the app, a new user can join a server in their browser with just a name which is as low friction as you can get.
I need the opposite of this. Some of my friends just want to sit in Discord and play the same three games all day every day. I either need a way to get them to do something different or to find new friends
Reminds me of those old coworking circles I used to be part of. Not about being productive really, but more about giving people a reason to show up and talk. Friction gets replaced with rhythm.
I tried that a long time ago with teamspeak, and then discord, but my friends are not big users of these tools and so it didnt work. Discords do too much. If whatsapp could do this it could work
I do think that whatsapp could do this tbh if it would actually provide its api like discord does.
Telegram feels like it can definitely do such stuff and I found in my opinion that its way easier to host telegram bot on cloudflare than it is on discord so theoretically you could even have it as a cf worker with a deploy on cf button so as to even people who don't know too much about deploying could use it.
My friend group just uses a separate group chat where the purpose is just to say "Hey I'm hopping onto discord if anyone wants to hang out" and it works well enough.
This reminds me of the Houseparty app that took off with my friend group during Covid. It had a mechanism to notify others when someone had joined a party. Fun times
We just use a slack. The overwhelming single channel? nope. channels for all the hobbies, shitposting, news, games, etc. We even have a discord notification for gaming channel when people get on the gaming channel. Separate notification for the chat channel if someone wants to just chill.
Now I feel old, back in my days we all hung out on IRC and we broadcast a wav file to call on friends to join game, and had crazy scripts and bots that did weekly summary, best engagement line and so on and so forth
God I'm so jealous you were able to get your friends to join Discord.
My in-person friend group revolved around the bar we all went to. When the bar shut down, I floated the idea of a group chat but couldn't get anyone interested. No one wants to install another app and get notified more. In olden days, we'd just solve the problem with Facebook, but no one uses that anymore either. My friends are ordinary, normal, overworked people who need an easy option. The bar was that. Show up when you want to connect. Easy.
So now there's nothing. I basically just lost all my friends. We all have each other's numbers but that's just not an option for coordination.
Fuck you, Mark Zuckerberg, for making Facebook so shitty it's not even useful anymore for the one thing I ever found it useful for. I hope when we finally start coming for the billionaires, we come for you first.
Sorry to hear that. FWIW it feels like there was probably a mismatch in valuation of the friendship there.
For my case I was able to convince many friends to connect on various chat platforms of their choice. Some friendships fizzled out, others are still going. And then there are some anew.
Unfortunately a lot of our friendships are essentially default proximity relationships. These tend to not survive as soon as the first obstacle to proximity shows up if not enough people are willing to put in the effort to make it something more.
This is why it’s so hard to make local friends as an adult in a new city. Good inspiration for me to make something similar to keep in touch with real people!
Perhaps read it, use one of the many discord wrapper apis, and replicate it. He just hooks into one of the many events discord emits and bot sends a message.
Even one of the LLMs can very easily vibe code this…
For small projects I tend to use write because that's what it feels like. For bigger things where there is a design element, I'll usually say designed and wrote X instead if I want emphasize its non-triviality.
I didn't think of it before but you're right building feels like implying more weight than it feels right. But also I concede this is quite subjective.
donatj|8 months ago
There's no source of that signal that someone is open to chitchat these days, and it's in my opinion kind of killed what was once great about online communication.
101008|8 months ago
People used to be offline by default. You had to “connect to the internet.” Open MSN, go into forums and check the latest unread messages, come back from a concert and manually upload the photos to your Fotolog or wherever. Now it's the opposite. We are online by default. The expectation is that we're always connected and respond quickly. Going to a sports event or a concert? You have to post a story to Instagram from that very place, not when you get home. Someone sends you an email or a WhatsApp message? You’re expected to reply as soon as possible.
That’s what I miss most about the internet—the idea and the feeling that I would go online when I wanted to, not that I lived inside the internet 24/7.
shark1|8 months ago
Social networks make people tired/satisfied/overwhelmed of "interacting online", and in the worst possible way: passively, not producing anything and just consuming it.
It sucks.
bartread|8 months ago
dkersten|8 months ago
kqr|8 months ago
midtake|8 months ago
BLKNSLVR|8 months ago
It can be modified to never show you're online, or show 'away' or something, but it's similar. It also displays how many are online in a channel on a server, and then you can open the list.
Despite that, however, it still feels 'different' to how it was, but I think we're also 'different'. Being (significantly) older now I have more responsibilities and pressures for my time so I'm less likely (like zero chance) to be sitting idle waiting for random chats.
We'd have to ask those who are, now, the age we were then - but then they also have no frame of reference. My son is often chatting to his friends online, but I think they're exclusively friends from meatspace rather than electronic strangers.
dymk|8 months ago
godot|8 months ago
I get that most leisure computing has moved off of desktop to mobile in modern days, but there's definitely enough of us nerds who're on a computer a lot (even if just for work, if nothing else). It can't be any less than in the late 1990s when ICQ was popular.
vjk800|8 months ago
Spooky23|8 months ago
There was alot of waiting involved, and I would chat on icq with a lot of random people in Europe. I ended up meeting one person!
The problem is… people are people and do nasty things. I have a good friend who is a few years younger. She found herself on the “information superhighway” at 13-14, blue collar parents who had no idea what she was doing alone on AIM or what that was. She find herself meeting this charming guy… who happened to be in his 30’s.
Learning about how common that was was very sobering… as this thing that represented fun and friends to me ended up being malevolent to many.
BrenBarn|8 months ago
caned|8 months ago
heresie-dabord|8 months ago
Show HN: Coffeehouse, one-on-one voicechat with random HN users
(I have no association with the post, the people, or the project.)joseda-hg|8 months ago
mock-possum|8 months ago
deltaburnt|8 months ago
wildpeaks|8 months ago
s0rce|8 months ago
cronelius|8 months ago
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nuancebydefault|8 months ago
ljlolel|8 months ago
thedanbob|8 months ago
Hah, I'm also building something like this for notification purposes. My wife's tablet sometimes doesn't show notifications and she's often not near her phone, so I ordered some ESP32's and LED boards[0]. Going to scatter them around the house and link them to a switch in Home Assistant so I can light them up if I need to get a hold of her. I'm planning a back-and-forth scan effect to make sure they're eye-catching, already named them Cylons.
[0] https://ae-pic-a1.aliexpress-media.com/kf/S9b244caf41934a5eb...
DrillShopper|8 months ago
As a result, we were looking into a very similar system where we each have an LED signboard, speaker, and priority lights on the top of a small device that lives on top of our monitors along with an app where she can select "not urgent, but you should know", "when you have a moment", "as soon as you can", and "urgent, right now" in an app, with an optional message, and the device makes a tone and lights the lights associated with the most recent, highest priority message as well as reminding every five minutes.
I'm playing with an ESP32 right now to implement, but it's nice to see that the entire concept isn't entirely unprecidented.
bell-cot|8 months ago
f3b5|8 months ago
rockostrich|8 months ago
# Music Quiz Bot
Existing apps work ok. A lot of paid and don't let you use a specific Spotify playlist.
The only thing annoying about this one is that none of the Discord API wrappers handle audio very well so I've found that this one gets a bit flaky if you're trying to play a lot.
This one is probably like 500 lines of Typescript but a lot of that is for the Spotify API. The game logic is pretty minimal.
# Birthday Bot
This is like 10 lines of Python. It's a cron that reads from a Google Sheet my friends and I keep up to date with personal information. If it's someone's birthday then it'll post a happy birthday message to them.
# Plex Bot
I wrote this before I discovered that Overseerr just has this built-in. My Plex was set up with a webhook to hit whenever new media was downloaded. The bot would post to a specific thread with the metadata about the new media. This included another webserver for serving the cover art from the private Plex metadata server.
# Movie Quiz Bot
Similar to the music bot although I don't think existing apps exist that do this. Essentially it's https://framed.wtf/ except as a game in a Discord channel where random frames are pulled from movies in my media library and everyone competes to name the movie first. This one required some ffmpeg fun to make pulling the stills not take forever. I considered doing static stills or having a cronjob do it, but it's more fun when it's completely random.
tomashubelbauer|8 months ago
But I wasn't able to get on top of its notification system or get past the gamer heavy UI.
Does your friend group consist of mainly techies? If not, I am impressed you were able to get them to use it. Even more so if they were already on it. I tried to get folks to use Signal with me for a bit and it was the most futile endeavor I've ever attempted.
sneak|8 months ago
Nothing that builds up an ever-growing surveillance database on private conversations between friends can be in the running for “best”.
Gamemaster1379|8 months ago
1) Reminder bot for scheduled events.
We're all working adults who all played games as teens together . To actually get us together, we schedule our favorite games for once a month to play for a few hours. We all often forget when they start, so my bot posts a 2 week, 1 week 3 days, and 2 hour notice.
2) RCON bot I run a TF2 server and a Minecraft server. You can manage both via RCON commands via slash commands in Discord. Also the tf2 one monitors player activity and alerts if players are in the server
3. Private server API bot
I founded a private game server for a game that ended service in 2023. The bot reads from our API to make a central list of lobbies and status. It also creates voice channels for each public lobby.
It's also used to help grant items and other admin commands.
4. For April Fools, I made a snarky bot that responded to random messages. It was backed by Gemini.
These have all been fun and novel to make but I've never found a great way to productize them and make money from any of them. Wonder if you've found any avenues there.
crossroadsguy|8 months ago
udev4096|8 months ago
__MatrixMan__|8 months ago
Shame on discord for having a lousy privacy stance, but most people aren't on signal for the privacy, most people are on signal because that's where their friends are (and one or two of those friends is there for the privacy).
Harmon758|8 months ago
https://discord.com/blog/meet-dave-e2ee-for-audio-video
augment_me|8 months ago
I can make the decision to use Signal or whatever, but as long as my whole social circle does not do the same, it wont be useful. And since when they do the swap, they have to convince their whole social circle to do the same, this becomes an impossible task. Either you have 10 different apps for different friends that lie on different places on the ethics of privacy, or you just take the easy way out and use what everyone uses.
worldsayshi|8 months ago
sadeshmukh|8 months ago
jrm4|8 months ago
About 2 years later Twitter came out and I was like "oh, I guess I was on to something." :)
Pyrodogg|8 months ago
It's nice to hear that this group found a way to maintain the spontaneity.
tomashubelbauer|8 months ago
Arainach|8 months ago
One big noisy chat for everything is an antipattern, as any group of sufficient size eventually learns.
bombcar|8 months ago
Organized channels is the way to go and spending time thinking about setup is worth it. Otherwise they develop naturally and haphazardly.
dandano|8 months ago
jedimastert|8 months ago
jedimastert|8 months ago
Aachen|8 months ago
tetris11|8 months ago
codingdave|8 months ago
exiguus|8 months ago
Personally, in my circle of friends, we use slack (at first the free plan and now a payed plan).
During the pandemic we moved to the payed plan, because of the restriction on members in huddles/calls (and also because we want endless history and our own encryption keys).
Currently we have Game (D&D e.g.), PP and Small-talk channels that we use to have huddles that everyone can join.
Mostly we create other channels on demand to organise things. Or share knowledge, music and so on.
One nice feature with slack is, that you can receive notification if a huddle starts in a channel, also on mobile, if you have the app. I don't know how often we use this notifications to join the small-talk channel. Personally, i join them every other week because i get notified.
PS: If someone from slack reads this, please do a friends plan, something between the free and pro plan :)
turbopasi|8 months ago
taraindara|8 months ago
udev4096|8 months ago
ksynwa|8 months ago
braiamp|8 months ago
drewtato|8 months ago
kadhirvelm|8 months ago
ethan_smith|8 months ago
rpgbr|8 months ago
dandano|8 months ago
Ringz|8 months ago
I always believed in the power of simple tools and don’t reinvent the wheel.
leptons|8 months ago
peterldowns|8 months ago
Good times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_(app)
stevage|8 months ago
> Over the next year, our group chat (in Signal) was drowning in notifications. A mix of general chit chat, talks on the ever changing news of COVID and the most important - when can people play games and chat. It really annoyed me when people would post on "hey anyone wanna play [game] in 15 mins?", for it to be buried in another 5 messages.
My friend group's solution to this problem is...lots of different group chats. They're all on Google Chat, but we have tons of different ones for different topics: bikes, space, covid/infectious diseases, baking, craft, plants, wildlife, true crime, politics, depressing news, renewables/sustainability, tech geekery, board games, home improvement...
I do miss video chat nights during lockdown though.
henryaj|8 months ago
https://faq.whatsapp.com/1973730693032338
fdgjgbdfhgb|8 months ago
eveld|8 months ago
johndhi|8 months ago
Never made it but glad to see these things can work.
johndhi|8 months ago
subpixel|8 months ago
I'm afraid I can't relate to this at all. I may a bit older and/or I may have less close friends but I prefer a very different kind of social contact that is more like make plans, meet up, rinse and repeat.
Back in the AIM/ORC days I loathed being pinged all the time for chit chat - this system reminds me of that!
flooo|8 months ago
It’s great to separate for record keeping, but mostly to avoid forcing the conversation on some organisational thing when the other just needs eg to vent about something at work
unethical_ban|8 months ago
I think the "I am here, now" alert does more than the "hey who is around?" message.
m-hodges|8 months ago
Imustaskforhelp|8 months ago
But in the meantime if I had to genuinely suggest a method without any friction if you are okay with using code like the author did, then I'd suggest something and lemme know what you think
Why don't you just create a special emoji that would only be used for the purposes of Pin, like (Oh the irony), and then have a signal cli or signal-bot https://github.com/signal-bot/signal-bot where you could do something like /pins and it would show the pins but you would need a different mobile number or account for that and honestly just a big hassle. I could think of other ways but we would never reach the native User experience that signal could provide if it would allow pin natively
EDIT: Even a more simpler way could be if we could just search the chat emojis and we could just search <the pin emoji> and it would show it
Also I am surprised that HN doesn't allow emojis
dnrvs|8 months ago
i eventually moved the bot to glitch.com (rip) where we could collaborate on it and it evolved into a monster of in jokes and utilities. it's going offline this week unless i can find the time to migrate it off glitch
mlok|8 months ago
Leo-thorne|8 months ago
ZeroCool2u|8 months ago
aCodeCrafter|8 months ago
mebizzle|8 months ago
fudged71|8 months ago
russellbeattie|8 months ago
socalgal2|8 months ago
demaga|8 months ago
You don't get hundreds of messages per day by writing in email style. You get there if you have a lot of synchronous or near-synchronous communication in chat. It's kind of obvious that voice call suits this better, but there is friction involved in making an actual call.
Discord voice channel might reduce the friction if you make this culture of hopping in and out of it.
anigbrowl|8 months ago
billdybas|8 months ago
This was surprising to me – is this typical of most Discord users (primarily desktop users over mobile)?
OkayPhysicist|8 months ago
daedrdev|8 months ago
subjectsigma|8 months ago
guicen|8 months ago
baby|8 months ago
Imustaskforhelp|8 months ago
Telegram feels like it can definitely do such stuff and I found in my opinion that its way easier to host telegram bot on cloudflare than it is on discord so theoretically you could even have it as a cf worker with a deploy on cf button so as to even people who don't know too much about deploying could use it.
henryaj|8 months ago
cubefox|8 months ago
squeaky-clean|8 months ago
outlore|8 months ago
pizzathyme|8 months ago
mordae|8 months ago
725686|8 months ago
thomascountz|8 months ago
lloydatkinson|8 months ago
excalibur|8 months ago
ohashi|8 months ago
alliao|8 months ago
vinceguidry|8 months ago
My in-person friend group revolved around the bar we all went to. When the bar shut down, I floated the idea of a group chat but couldn't get anyone interested. No one wants to install another app and get notified more. In olden days, we'd just solve the problem with Facebook, but no one uses that anymore either. My friends are ordinary, normal, overworked people who need an easy option. The bar was that. Show up when you want to connect. Easy.
So now there's nothing. I basically just lost all my friends. We all have each other's numbers but that's just not an option for coordination.
Fuck you, Mark Zuckerberg, for making Facebook so shitty it's not even useful anymore for the one thing I ever found it useful for. I hope when we finally start coming for the billionaires, we come for you first.
whatevertrevor|8 months ago
For my case I was able to convince many friends to connect on various chat platforms of their choice. Some friendships fizzled out, others are still going. And then there are some anew.
Unfortunately a lot of our friendships are essentially default proximity relationships. These tend to not survive as soon as the first obstacle to proximity shows up if not enough people are willing to put in the effort to make it something more.
echelon_musk|8 months ago
asdf6969|8 months ago
unknown|8 months ago
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apps4datr2025|8 months ago
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anigbrowl|8 months ago
CHUCKEESH|8 months ago
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pyfan878|8 months ago
dangus|8 months ago
dandano|8 months ago
xyst|8 months ago
Perhaps read it, use one of the many discord wrapper apis, and replicate it. He just hooks into one of the many events discord emits and bot sends a message.
Even one of the LLMs can very easily vibe code this…
catigula|8 months ago
Retric|8 months ago
There’s a line between baking a cake and building a wedding cake where it stops being about the ingredients and starts being about the desired form. https://shunbridal.com/article/how-tobuild-a-wedding-cake
It’s in that context where building software makes sense. You need to link a bunch of different components together to make a greater whole.
whatevertrevor|8 months ago
I didn't think of it before but you're right building feels like implying more weight than it feels right. But also I concede this is quite subjective.
elendee|8 months ago
bongodongobob|8 months ago