7 ms·

Show HN: Micro Chat – Private group chat

64 points by asim 3y ago

Hey all 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 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. https://micro.mu https://micro.mu

dominick-cc 3y ago
I wish the code repository was linked from the website to make it easier to find. It would be nice to see some screenshots of feature details without having to sign into your instance.
- asim 3y ago
  Will take that on board. Does it matter where the code is? Doesn't seem like people care about Notions source code.
  - dominick-cc 3y ago
    It doesn't matter to me where the code is. But you said it was "open source" so I assume the source code is publicly accessible somewhere, right?
    - asim 3y ago
      Sorry what I meant is I've been working on the open source Micro project for 8 years which underpins this. The chat app itself was not really something I meant as being open source but yes it's in a separate repo with the API hosting product I built called M3O.com. https://github.com/m3o/m3o https://github.com/m3o/m3o https://github.com/micro/micro https://github.com/micro/micro
bmarquez 3y ago
This sounds pretty awesome, like a private Discord server or replacement for Facebook groups that's actually private (assuming it can be self-hosted or encrypted). 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.
- asim 3y ago
  Yes this is a proof of concept. I'm just trying to figure out what the core features should be and whether other people will be interested too. It can potentially be self hosted but it's quite a complex stack at the moment. There's encryption at rest of the data but not e2e encryption of messages just yet. Will look into that a bit later. I think mostly the focus is provide a place for small private communities to be built and start addressing those issues over time.
Neff 3y ago
I would love to see some screenshots or examples of the service on the landing page. Right now the landing page is sparse and I have no idea of what the experience will be like. There will be a huge hurdle to get people to leave the assortment of networks they are already on. What makes this different than Signal, WhatsApp, Discord, Facebook Groups, Telegram, or any other messaging service? 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
- asim 3y ago
  Thanks, I'll take those comments on board. I literally just posted it as soon as I thought it was ready to go. I think the big elephant in the room is definitely how you get people to move off other platforms but then I realised I can't build with that mindset. I have to build something I would want to use first and then hope there will be many others like me. My primary goal is a place I can build these small communities for my family, my friends, my interests, my religion, etc. I just feel like that's really missing. The world is too public. I need to take this all private. 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.
bruceb 3y ago
Here is some straight forward feedback and advice. There is no compelling reason to use your chat as of now. Look at the first 3 things you talk about. Private. Anyone can setup a private group already an dozens of msging apps. Real Networks. Same as first, can already be done. Topic oriented. So channels? You might be a skilled dev, but you still have to make something that is either better than what exist or different.
- asim 3y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. I guess my issue is, as a user of slack, discord, twitter, WhatsApp and other chat products, they have never really solved my community problems. Discord is a largely public gamer platform that is now being used for other things. Twitter is a public broadcast network. Slack is for work. WhatsApp is private but single channel groups and owned by Facebook. I'm not trying to build for the sake of building. I just honestly can't find a place to build small private communities in a sane way. I want to add events and todos and a few other things. Think of it like private Facebook groups. I also want to try build something managed by a small collective of engineers who want to pull their data off these public platforms. I appreciate the comments though.
  - sjftokyo 3y ago
    "I just honestly can't find a place to build small private communities in a sane way." 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.
    - e12e 3y ago
      Signal isn't a great option for general community group chat if you primarily use it for immediate (urgent) texting, though. It breaks down especially when you add global connections in different time zones. 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".
idiotsecant 3y ago
When I read this description the first thing it makes me think about is how this is different from any other IM client. When I go to your website I see a couple fluffy sentences and then a signup link. 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.
- asim 3y ago
  I think the screenshot thing is coming up a lot so I'll craft something for it. On holiday at the moment with no laptop. Just thought I'd share it asap!
  - jadbox 3y ago
    Pro tip, don't plan a holiday right after releasing a project publicly (especially HN). There will inevitably be bugs, server may crash, someone may try to hack server data, etc.
    - asim 3y ago
      :D I was in the middle of a holiday and on a whim decided to post it. I'm sort of in a strange phase of trying to figure my life out and part of that means reflexively doing things in the hope it works. Past HN traction usually gave me enough confidence to keep going, so thanks to all here!
apsurd 3y ago
> I think the tech and the product will evolve but only by finding out if others feel the same. 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.
- asim 3y ago
  Thanks that's really positive to hear! And I agree. Where everyone is talking about AI I'm really thinking, what does a private human only network look like. We should really just all go offline but in the digital world that means going private and not letting AI see our conversations. You can bet every corporation is now running chats through AI. You have no control over this. Plus yea the addictive nature of social media has made it really hard to detach from it. If we could slow down the pace, maybe we give ourselves a chance to reset and recover.
- holler 3y ago
  > "the future is human" 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.
  - asim 3y ago
    I really like this idea. No bots. It's quite refreshing considering everything is about to get AI-ified.
pooper 3y ago
> 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. I love that the hamburger menu icon is the image of a burger. Thank you for the laugh :D
- asim 3y ago
  Thanks! Gotta give credit to a past friend and colleague who came up with that idea when we went through a previous incarnation of this for teams during the pandemic.
lagniappe 3y ago
This is really cool! Do you have plans to start charging for this service eventually or any premium offerings?
- asim 3y ago
  Thanks! Still figuring it out. I think it definitely has to make money somehow but too early to say how. First ideas were obvious ones but I think we might do something like charging for additional services within the chat e.g commands that give you news and weather information, real time events, etc.
huhtenberg 3y ago
Very clean, super snappy, no external dependencies. Excellent first impression. Compliments to the chef. 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.
- asim 3y ago
  I do agree. The hard part will be figuring out how to do that. So my background is in networks and I think SMTP was always a great example of a solid network. The question on the self hosting front is, how many moving parts will people tolerate. This was built on a past Dev product. So there's a lot of inherit tech debt. I'd have to rebuild a version that could be self hosted and federated. Just depends on whether it makes practical sense.
  - apsurd 3y ago
    my bias is in product development experience so from that lens i think it's a mistake to focus on the technical aspect of your pitch, or really any technical improvement. "chat is a solved problem" to people. mind you, i get annoyed when people say that line, but it's good way to force a discipline to focus on the unique people problem, not make another chat stack. 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
    - asim 3y ago
RajT88 3y ago
Small issue: Peak > Peek
- asim 3y ago
  Fixed
srameshc 3y ago
I really admire Asim's work probably know him for his Go microservices thing. I was quite excited about the developer platform he was building and the microservices platform before on the same link but it took a strange turn. Anyways always like how he can keep things very simple with everything and will go ahead and give this a try. Hopefully this is the final product iteration of micro.mu, Best wishesh :)
- asim 3y ago
  Thanks for the kind words! Sorry the other stuff took a bad turn. I raised VC funding in 2019 as a solo founder and ended up in the relentless pursuit of product market fit after building an oss project. That plus COVID plus a baby plus not being able to raise further funding made life pretty hard and I was making fast painful decisions. I honestly had big hopes for micro and the microservices side of things. Unfortunately it was just too hard as one person and harder trying to build a Dev product around it.
sebmellen 3y ago
> We encountered an error when trying to load your application and your page could not be served. Check the logs for your application in the App Platform dashboard.
- asim 3y ago
  Apologies. Having some platform issues.
- tony-allan 3y ago
  ditto
m3kw9 3y ago
On the surface it looks like WhatsApp group chat, signal group chat, they all have privacy and encryption. How do you guys deal with marketing against these guys.
- DiscourseFan 3y ago
  Yeah, even iMessage is encrypted (though its not as if I trust it!) I'm not sure what this offers that many other established services doesn't.

64 points by asim 3y ago

dominick-cc 3y ago

I wish the code repository was linked from the website to make it easier to find. It would be nice to see some screenshots of feature details without having to sign into your instance.

asim 3y ago
Will take that on board. Does it matter where the code is? Doesn't seem like people care about Notions source code.
- dominick-cc 3y ago
  It doesn't matter to me where the code is. But you said it was "open source" so I assume the source code is publicly accessible somewhere, right?
  - asim 3y ago
    Sorry what I meant is I've been working on the open source Micro project for 8 years which underpins this. The chat app itself was not really something I meant as being open source but yes it's in a separate repo with the API hosting product I built called M3O.com. https://github.com/m3o/m3o https://github.com/m3o/m3o https://github.com/micro/micro https://github.com/micro/micro

bmarquez 3y ago

This sounds pretty awesome, like a private Discord server or replacement for Facebook groups that's actually private (assuming it can be self-hosted or encrypted). 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.

asim 3y ago
Yes this is a proof of concept. I'm just trying to figure out what the core features should be and whether other people will be interested too. It can potentially be self hosted but it's quite a complex stack at the moment. There's encryption at rest of the data but not e2e encryption of messages just yet. Will look into that a bit later. I think mostly the focus is provide a place for small private communities to be built and start addressing those issues over time.

Neff 3y ago

I would love to see some screenshots or examples of the service on the landing page. Right now the landing page is sparse and I have no idea of what the experience will be like. There will be a huge hurdle to get people to leave the assortment of networks they are already on. What makes this different than Signal, WhatsApp, Discord, Facebook Groups, Telegram, or any other messaging service? 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

asim 3y ago
Thanks, I'll take those comments on board. I literally just posted it as soon as I thought it was ready to go. I think the big elephant in the room is definitely how you get people to move off other platforms but then I realised I can't build with that mindset. I have to build something I would want to use first and then hope there will be many others like me. My primary goal is a place I can build these small communities for my family, my friends, my interests, my religion, etc. I just feel like that's really missing. The world is too public. I need to take this all private. 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.

bruceb 3y ago

Here is some straight forward feedback and advice. There is no compelling reason to use your chat as of now. Look at the first 3 things you talk about. Private. Anyone can setup a private group already an dozens of msging apps. Real Networks. Same as first, can already be done. Topic oriented. So channels? You might be a skilled dev, but you still have to make something that is either better than what exist or different.

asim 3y ago
Thanks for the feedback. I guess my issue is, as a user of slack, discord, twitter, WhatsApp and other chat products, they have never really solved my community problems. Discord is a largely public gamer platform that is now being used for other things. Twitter is a public broadcast network. Slack is for work. WhatsApp is private but single channel groups and owned by Facebook. I'm not trying to build for the sake of building. I just honestly can't find a place to build small private communities in a sane way. I want to add events and todos and a few other things. Think of it like private Facebook groups. I also want to try build something managed by a small collective of engineers who want to pull their data off these public platforms. I appreciate the comments though.
- sjftokyo 3y ago
  "I just honestly can't find a place to build small private communities in a sane way." 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.
  - e12e 3y ago
    Signal isn't a great option for general community group chat if you primarily use it for immediate (urgent) texting, though. It breaks down especially when you add global connections in different time zones. 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".

idiotsecant 3y ago

When I read this description the first thing it makes me think about is how this is different from any other IM client. When I go to your website I see a couple fluffy sentences and then a signup link. 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.

asim 3y ago
I think the screenshot thing is coming up a lot so I'll craft something for it. On holiday at the moment with no laptop. Just thought I'd share it asap!
- jadbox 3y ago
  Pro tip, don't plan a holiday right after releasing a project publicly (especially HN). There will inevitably be bugs, server may crash, someone may try to hack server data, etc.
  - asim 3y ago
    :D I was in the middle of a holiday and on a whim decided to post it. I'm sort of in a strange phase of trying to figure my life out and part of that means reflexively doing things in the hope it works. Past HN traction usually gave me enough confidence to keep going, so thanks to all here!

apsurd 3y ago

> I think the tech and the product will evolve but only by finding out if others feel the same. 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.

asim 3y ago
Thanks that's really positive to hear! And I agree. Where everyone is talking about AI I'm really thinking, what does a private human only network look like. We should really just all go offline but in the digital world that means going private and not letting AI see our conversations. You can bet every corporation is now running chats through AI. You have no control over this. Plus yea the addictive nature of social media has made it really hard to detach from it. If we could slow down the pace, maybe we give ourselves a chance to reset and recover.
holler 3y ago
> "the future is human" 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.
- asim 3y ago
  I really like this idea. No bots. It's quite refreshing considering everything is about to get AI-ified.

pooper 3y ago

> 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. I love that the hamburger menu icon is the image of a burger. Thank you for the laugh :D

asim 3y ago
Thanks! Gotta give credit to a past friend and colleague who came up with that idea when we went through a previous incarnation of this for teams during the pandemic.

lagniappe 3y ago

This is really cool! Do you have plans to start charging for this service eventually or any premium offerings?

asim 3y ago
Thanks! Still figuring it out. I think it definitely has to make money somehow but too early to say how. First ideas were obvious ones but I think we might do something like charging for additional services within the chat e.g commands that give you news and weather information, real time events, etc.

huhtenberg 3y ago

Very clean, super snappy, no external dependencies. Excellent first impression. Compliments to the chef. 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.

asim 3y ago
I do agree. The hard part will be figuring out how to do that. So my background is in networks and I think SMTP was always a great example of a solid network. The question on the self hosting front is, how many moving parts will people tolerate. This was built on a past Dev product. So there's a lot of inherit tech debt. I'd have to rebuild a version that could be self hosted and federated. Just depends on whether it makes practical sense.
- apsurd 3y ago
  my bias is in product development experience so from that lens i think it's a mistake to focus on the technical aspect of your pitch, or really any technical improvement. "chat is a solved problem" to people. mind you, i get annoyed when people say that line, but it's good way to force a discipline to focus on the unique people problem, not make another chat stack. 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
  - asim 3y ago

RajT88 3y ago

Small issue: Peak > Peek

asim 3y ago
Fixed

srameshc 3y ago

I really admire Asim's work probably know him for his Go microservices thing. I was quite excited about the developer platform he was building and the microservices platform before on the same link but it took a strange turn. Anyways always like how he can keep things very simple with everything and will go ahead and give this a try. Hopefully this is the final product iteration of micro.mu, Best wishesh :)

asim 3y ago
Thanks for the kind words! Sorry the other stuff took a bad turn. I raised VC funding in 2019 as a solo founder and ended up in the relentless pursuit of product market fit after building an oss project. That plus COVID plus a baby plus not being able to raise further funding made life pretty hard and I was making fast painful decisions. I honestly had big hopes for micro and the microservices side of things. Unfortunately it was just too hard as one person and harder trying to build a Dev product around it.

sebmellen 3y ago

> We encountered an error when trying to load your application and your page could not be served. Check the logs for your application in the App Platform dashboard.

asim 3y ago
Apologies. Having some platform issues.
tony-allan 3y ago
ditto

m3kw9 3y ago

On the surface it looks like WhatsApp group chat, signal group chat, they all have privacy and encryption. How do you guys deal with marketing against these guys.

DiscourseFan 3y ago
Yeah, even iMessage is encrypted (though its not as if I trust it!) I'm not sure what this offers that many other established services doesn't.