Would you like a Slack alternative which focused on public communities, e.g. modern day IRC :-) ?
Been thinking about this idea for a while, not sure how to monetize it, but in the future, could be via paid public channels.
What do you think about the overall idea? A macOS and Windows app looks just like Slack, but allows users to create their own channels/communities. Would be similar to old days IRC or even Discord (but simpler, and not focused specifically to gamers). I know all this can be done with Slack but Slack is focused on work places, so this product would have features specific to public communities, etc.
What do you think?
Have you come across https://spectrum.chat before?
You can also try Hidifferent. It's still under development, so any feedback would be appreciated!
Features:
Everyone is welcome to create public(free) or private(paid feature) communities, moderators can create public or private channels.
For example, Web Development, Jobs
A blog that supports tags, RSS and syncs on Github.
For example my blog.
Writing and publish Books(still under development), you can write yourself or invites other people to work with you. So in the future, there may be dozens of people writing a book on
Culture: Japanat the same time, :)RSSfor public communities and blogs.Different from Spectrum:
Our focus is to make it easier to learn about different cultures.
Personally, I don't enjoy a big
feedof contents from different areas, it always makes me distracted. It might be ok if your communities are not that much.We don't support
chat. In the near future, we'll provide adiscourselike conversations system.Btw, Spectrum is really great!
are you guys VC funded? how do you plan on monetizing it?
Not yet, we want a solid product first.
About monetizing, we'd like to be ads free, so we'll provide:
This space is so crowded with teams working really hard to disrupt. As someone who works in community organizing and politics, my experience is that tech people are looking for new tools to communicate with people but the vast majority of people being organized do not want to learn something new. They simply prefer email, or Facebook. Even the half dozen Slack communities I’m on are quieter than email lists I’m on. Teaching people who don’t speak tech fluently how to integrate a new communications tool into their every day life is HARD. Even IRC’s reach was pretty limited - far smaller than something like Telegram now I would bet. In short, this sounds like a passion project looking for a problem, as opposed to a pressing problem that you have a unique solution for.
We built pretty much what you describe, with https://www.chapp.is. At the time, I hadn’t even heard of Slack, and we liked the idea of bringing IRC (of sorts) to the browser. We even got a little press for it: https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/04/chapp/
The challenge with this idea isn’t the build; it’s the community development. Growing a niche community is time consuming and difficult. Growing one for an undefined audience? That’s even more complex (by several orders of magnitude). For that reason, I’d be wary of building what you describe.
The only path to success I see with such a thing, depends on a unique use case. Unfortunately, that won’t be easy, either. There are are already many clients (as you see in Sameroom’s History of Chat: https://sameroom.io/blog/this-is-the-history-of-chat/)
Who knows? You could make this work. That said, I don’t think this is a burning problem. You’d probably fare better by identifying a more discrete problem.
Isn't this what Telegram is doing?
It already exists, its called Gitter
Interesting question. I've been seeing that question come up now and again for about the last 18 years. I'm an IRC Operator (IRCCop, yo!) on what was one of the world's largest IRC networks (Undernet) back in the day. I've also written server-side code that handled various extensions and services to the IRC protocol stack over the years (ircu, GNUWorld, Chanfix, etc)
IRC has always had the whole public openness and ease of access thing going for it (ease of access to content). Fortunately, there has been a paradigm shift in the way that we use computers today, so installation needs to be quick and easy, or better yet, non-existent in the form of a webapp. So, there's a space here that can be filled. People don't really have an easily accessible live chat medium to engage with various communities, get questions answered, etc. One key point is that you also want to make that content searchable and indexable. For example, when I'd have issues with C/C++/Linux/YouNameIt back in the day, the IRC channels were hands down one of the BEST places to get support. The problem was that there were a lot of repeat questions, and that content wasn't indexed, and it didn't really benefit the community owner in terms of SEO or authority.
I think you should honestly go for it. I, for one, would love to see that come to life, and I think I might actually use it.
Hack on!
Thanks for the feedback.
What would entice you to join the platform once built and also invite your friends to join as well?
The main concern I have is around acquiring the initial users because there won't be much content for new comers.
Take a look at history. Freenode is now one of the world's largest IRC networks thanks to one thing... open source project support. They catered to that community and welcomed them. So, perhaps you target them. Gitter experienced wild growth because they took that concept one step further... open source support directly integrated into github without any sort of download or installation.
If you started an IndieHackers chat with a few fellow IH'ers, I'd totally be in and I'd invite my other side-hustler friends over to join.
Question to answer: Why would IRC and Discord not be good enough? What are you solving, what value are you adding?
Ok this is better. Discord is focused on gamers and too complicated. IRC is too old. You can basically replace Slack with IRC too, but Slack is modern, and has far more features that makes it suitable for businesses.
Right now I'm looking for places that I can connect with other entrepeuners via online chat - There are public slack channels, but hard to discover and Slack wouldn't want to get into this space because they are focused on work places.
I tried Discord, but it's too complicated and very much focused on Gamers.
It looks like you created a problem, a solution, and now trying to defend it and not willing to hear any opinion. Is it worth it?
I'm in a ton of Discord communities that aren't about gaming, and there really isn't anything about the product that restricts it to gaming. Keep in mind that at any time Discord could rework their brand or tweak their UI. Discord isn't perfect (e.g. the styling has contrast problems and also low information density) but all of those things could get fixed and it might become painful to compete with its free offering and (mild) network effects.
Discord is a go-to chat for the most of subreddits nowadays. It also works faster and less complicated than Slack.
“Right now I'm looking for places that I can connect with other entrepeuners via online chat - There are public slack channels, but hard to discover.” - why not use Facebook groups ?
it's not chat. also, facebook is too distracting and bloated.
you should read the post man.