Show HN: Micro Chat – Private group chat (micro.mu)
I'm Asim. I'm an engineer who's been hacking on an open source project called Micro for the past eight years (https://micro.dev). In that time I've done a lot of things, all Dev related but ultimately most of my career was spent working on platforms for consumer products. After many attempts I've decided the path forward is to focus on building something that solves my own problem. Micro Chat is a solution to some of the social media problems I've been having.
What I've been looking for most of my life is a community. A place to belong. I scoured the internet for that with strangers. But I think that's wrong. The public forums are also the wrong place to find that connection. What we need to do is focus on smaller communities starting with real connections. We need to strip away a lot of the addictive behaviours and issues created by social media. I think things like hackernews are great because it's very simple text based, with no notification and centers around conversations about topics of interest. I think that's how group chat should also be. The difference here is, I want a place to build small private communities e.g micro communities. Most real groups lose their value beyond a certain size. For me that's around 20 people. As an introvert I really care about strong connections with a handful of people. Unfortunately those real world connections are now spread globally as people moved away and while we have private slacks or WhatsApp grojps to stay in touch it just feels like the wrong setup for that. If anything I want to consolidate it into one place.
Anyway I'm sharing this now to get some feedback. I think the tech and the product will evolve but only by finding out if others feel the same.
42 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 99.7 ms ] threadhttps://github.com/m3o/m3o https://github.com/micro/micro
One thing I noticed is that there's no privacy policy. I assume this is a proof of concept but people willing to use this product over Facebook care about how their information is stored and protected.
Few suggestions - The "Get started" button should take me to the sign up form, not the login form. My assumption is I am clicking the CTA to start without having an account. Going to the login form results in an extra click for the user. - Once I click "get started" the app breaks the back button. I can't go back to the landing page - Make your terms of use & privacy policy accessible from the landing page. Claiming to be "privacy first" but not having an accessible privacy policy feels in conflict
I'll look into the other stuff you mentioned too. I think the whole privacy first thing is to just say, it's an invite only network and nothing is public. But I know people care about privacy policies and terms of use. Tbh it's mostly us tech folk who bark on about it. Normal people don't care. My wife doesn't care. I gloss over these things. But I understand.
You might be a skilled dev, but you still have to make something that is either better than what exist or different.
I appreciate the comments though.
Signal does exactly this and I've used it to build a small private community of people who listen to my podcast. It's wonderful.
We are a small group with a discord "server" - and that works for us because most of us doesn't use discord for anything else - and i can comfortably have only notifications for dm/mentions and otherwise read it async at my leisure.
Granted discord has a gazillion knobs to tune notifications - but i could never make it work reasonably for diverse use cases like "wake me up in the night if family tries to reach me" and "never nag me about game updates - that I'll strictly check manually".
Is it not the case that when you're hanging out with some people, someone asks "hey man what's your facebook/number/discord" and then you get added to the group chat on whatever platform?
I can say from experience that wordpress+buddypress handles multiple private / public / partial each / optional for each group and profile.. all these things right out of the box, free, and WP is installable via softalicious on basic shared hosting environments.. as well as one click installs at places like DO I believe..
I like your calling to build more private group options, it's something I have hobbied with for more than a decade.
I think ultimately the roads for this end on paid instances that have an easy method for not just deploying - but migrating to other servers and moving domains and such as well - there becomes this push pull from edge cases of speech that will make the need to split and move the groups.
editing to add deeper dive into similar things in another thread popping today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36141083
This might be a great product but I have about a 12 second attention span for random new HN apps wherein I decide if I'm interested or not. I don't think I am atypical in that respect.
You might benefit from a few screenshots, is all i'm saying.
Yes, I agree, my personal tagline I play around with is: "the future is human"
It's supposed to be witty marketing. There's always value in zagging when people zig. Tons of energy and interest in AI and automation, I think it's reasonable to see a counter-balance of value in deliberately human, small-scale, ephemeral experiences/actions/art.
During the metaverse craze my tagline was "the Metaverse is 2D". It's pointing out that for all the effort to cross the uncanny valley, people continue to love retro 2D games, animal crossing, and I personally love the artistic style of "Paper Mario" where 2D characters navigate a 3D world.
Anyway, all to say, I'm with you that there's something really brewing in an "answer" to TikTok, Meta, Metaverse, AI, etc, etc not even that theres' something "wrong" with these pursuits, rather it's just really exhausting, and low-fidelity experiences that lean on old world humanness is a break that feels good, increasingly.
I concur strongly, there are seemingly daily new "ai" chat bot apps and yet I personally don't see human behavior fundamentally changing any time soon. Chat will always be primarily about humans and not bots.
I love that the hamburger menu icon is the image of a burger. Thank you for the laugh :D
That said, this needs a self-hosted option to be truly useful. One, for privacy reasons. Two, for decouple from you as a service provider. In particular, your service will get abused and sorting it out will put an undue burden on you, which in turn will likely cause you to throw the towel in at some point. The best remedy is to spread the admin load and let people host this themselves. A level up from there is to have a form of federation to let people from one instance participate in groups on other instances. If you manage to figure this out, while keeping the spirit and the aesthetics, you will have something both practical and durable.
the sentiment needs to land: are humans gonna sign up and bring other humans to interact with.
right now the messaging on the landing page isn't good enough to evoke that, but that's ok it's v1.
if you ask me, products need to be instantly understandable in like a 5-10 word sentence. and that sentence can take hundreds of iterations.
"1 hour grocery delivery" is the perfect product market fit. it's undeniable. disclaimer: used to work for this company =p
Peak > Peek