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A chat platform with only textual chat and file sharing isn't an alternative to Discord nor Slack. It is barely a slightly better version of IRC. Unfortunately

A chat platform with only textual chat and file sharing isn't an alternative to Discord nor Slack. It is barely a slightly better version of IRC. Unfortunately many messaging softwares seem to not understand what feature parity is.

busssard 3y ago
Its an opensource project. Instead of complaining, why dont you implement it? ;)
- hnarn 3y ago
  Completely beside the point. The comment you’re replying to was simply questioning the headline.
  - j_maffe 3y ago
    OP implies that the devs were the ones who wrote the headline though. They clearly stated that it is not (yet) a sound alternative to Discord.
    - plastic_bag 3y ago
      The About section of the repo literally says "A private, p2p alternative to Slack and Discord built on Tor & IPFS ". So the dev(s) are indeed claiming it's an alternative to both Slack and Discord.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- qabqabaca 3y ago
  He’s not complaining about it missing the features he wants, he’s complaining about it missing features of the products it’s presenting itself as an alternative to
- derelicta 3y ago
  As much as I hate to say that, they are right. If you want to be a significant competitor to centralized plateforms, you gotta at least do as much at them.
  - meiraleal 3y ago
    and from where would you start? How should the project be defined if they are yet not an alternative? The "soon to be if people contribute" P2P alternative to slack and discord?
- mrd3v0 3y ago
  As a major supporter of free software, I can't believe how many times I encounter this reply. No, not everyone has the resources nor skills to dedicate to a random unknown free software project online. Criticism is helpful and can inspire others who do have the time and skills to direct or fork the project into something more useful.
  - notpushkin 3y ago
    Criticism can be helpful indeed; it's the form that triggers this kind of response. Let's try this one more time: > Very impressive project! It's neat that you can get this far without relying on any central servers at all. Personally though, I'm missing a couple more features – this only has textual chat and file sharing, while Discord or Slack have a lot more niche features. Achieving feature parity is a prerequisite for getting any user base nowadays, so I hope it is something team would account for before the 1.0 launch :-)
    - _factor 3y ago
      It’s incredible how tone-deaf to their own tone of voice people can be.
      - notpushkin 3y ago
        This happens sometimes, yeah. We're all just mere humans after all.
    - holmesworcester 3y ago
      (Quiet founder here) I agree with the objection that not everybody can just contribute patches for major features to an open source project, and I think it's fair to say that the comparison to Slack and Discord is not 1:1 without voice and video calls (which we do plan to offer someday, FWIW) and to feel disappointed by that. Though I think when an open source alternative emerges it is usually understood that it could take a while to get to feature parity, and we try to be very clear about what Quiet already does and doesn't do yet on our homepage. That said, Quiet is written in TypeScript and built on a web stack almost every engineer is somewhat familiar with, so it's really easy to get hacking on, and we'd love the help. :) Here are the instructions to build Quiet desktop: https://github.com/TryQuiet/quiet/blob/develop/packages/desktop/README.md https://github.com/TryQuiet/quiet/blob/develop/packages/desk... And here are some good first issues! https://github.com/orgs/TryQuiet/projects/3/views/1?filterQuery=good+label%3A%22good+first+issue%22 https://github.com/orgs/TryQuiet/projects/3/views/1?filterQu...
- LoganDark 3y ago
  This is an extremely toxic attitude and helps no one.
j_maffe 3y ago
They say so in the project description. I think they understand what constitutes a group messaging app. It is, however, something that can be built upon and improve. That's how open source works, you have to start with just the basics. Still, it's a very good step in the right direction.
- holmesworcester 3y ago
  (Quiet founder here.) Yes, this! Based on our research with users who need sensitive communications, a working Slack or Discord alternative without video calling is desperately needed by some teams right now. (For example, teams who want end-to-end encryption but have a big community with highly specific moderation and vetting needs.) So starting with text, images, audio messages, etc. can get us a foothold and we can build from there. Just getting Quiet working as reliably as a centralized chat app on iOS and Android and finishing things like multi-party e2ee group chats with multiple device linking is going to be a big lift that could easily take us 6 months or more. Group video calls can come after that if our initial early adopters are asking for it!
ThatPlayer 3y ago
I don't agree that you need feature parity to be an alternative though. If your use-case is only text chat and file sharing, then it is an alternative. LibreOffice is still an alternative of Microsoft Office without having all the features. Firefox is an alternative of Chrome without WebHID or Web Bluetooth.
- Brybry 3y ago
  Discord's key features are chat and VoIP. File sharing is barely meaningful, except that it means not needing to use external image hosts for gifs/memes/pet pics. Discord's initial pull was from gamers who were using teamspeak/ventrilo/mumble + twitch chat and maybe IRC. If it doesn't do VoIP then it's not a viable alternative to Discord. It'd be like if LibreOffice couldn't save new files or if Firefox couldn't render images or video.
  - circuit10 3y ago
    I’m someone who uses Discord but (almost) never uses voice chat. To me it’s a text chat platform. This isn’t true for everyone but I feel like it is for a lot of people
    - Brybry 3y ago
      But think about why you're now using Discord instead of IRC or a forum: it's because of the users who were also pulled in for the core VoIP feature and because users would rather use one program than multiple. I didn't stop using Mumble or IRC because they couldn't, combined, meet my needs. I even prefer them to Discord on a principle basis. But everyone I wanted to communicate with moved to Discord because it was easier -- as it had both core features which are necessary for gamers.
      - croes 3y ago
        >But everyone I wanted to communicate with moved to Discord because it was easier -- as it had both core features which are necessary for gamers That's the real reason why you use Discord. Peer pressure. Discord is in no way a replacement for a forum
KoftaBob 3y ago
If we want to be pedantic about it, then let's call it an "Imperfect Substitute" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitute_good#Imperfect_substitutes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitute_good#Imperfect_subs...
ilyt 3y ago
And you don't just need to check a checkbox but implement them well stares at MS Teams vomits
meiraleal 3y ago
That's the magic of free software. It would only have feature parity so early on if it was VC-backed, which would not make any sense.
holmesworcester 3y ago
Quiet founder here! First, the big advantage of Quiet over IRC is that Quiet has eventual consistency built on a CRDT, so you'll sync messages sent while you were offline. In a team chat setting this is really useful and was one of Slack's big draws when it launched, as I remember it. Re: video calling -- end-to-end encrypted voice and video calls (or channels, huddles, what have you) are actually something we plan to add someday, as we've had users asking for it. Right now many voice and video calls are at least partly peer-to-peer, so with some caveats a p2p video calling solution is actually more straightforward than p2p chat. The caveats are: 1. We wouldn't want to use Tor, at least in its current form, because its multiple hops and lack of UDP support will increase latency, so you wouldn't get the same metadata privacy. 2. Larger group calls (>10 voice participants, >3 video participants) may well require a server, since the standard solution for pure p2p group calling is for all participants to stream pairwise to all participants, so the number of participants is limited by the upstream bandwidth of the slowest participant divided by the stream bitrate. 3. Even small group video calls often require a relay server sometimes, because roughly 10-20% of peers in real world settings cannot make direct connections to each other even with holepunching techniques. (A classic scenario: two peers on the same public wifi, when the router's security settings prohibit local connections, will need a reliable external server to send all the data.) So our current plan is to offer voice and video calling (and any other features that require a server, like file storage beyond the capacity of the network's devices) as a paid subscription feature. Picture a freemium SaaS product where the free version is open source, forkable, and fully reliable in its p2p form without any support from us. This gives users a lot of power to keep us honest, but it would let people pay us for stuff you really want a server for. All that said, maybe somebody will come up with a great p2p, large-group video calling solution with reliable decentralized holepunching and we can use that approach! (But I'm not holding my breath!)
- 37469920away 3y ago
  Always good to have alternatives. Thanks for your work and good luck.
  - holmesworcester 3y ago
lucideer 3y ago
Understanding feature parity is about: 1. Can the protocol support it (well) 2. Is the tech mature enough / is there enough contributors to ensure the client adds support For a new tech only the first bullet point is relevant - from a brief scan it seems like a hopeful but emphatic yes. I guess there's a third soft question which is, does the project have the branding, polish, marketing clout to gain traction: much harder to gauge but looks polished at least.
- lolinder 3y ago
  What you're defining is possible future feature parity, not feature parity. A project does not have feature parity until the features are actually built—promises that the features are possible and if you really wanted it you could build it yourself are nice in their own way, but they're not features.
  - lucideer 3y ago
    You're technically correct (the best kind of correct), but in the context of this comment thread the comment I was replying to said: > many messaging softwares seem to not understand what feature parity is. That implies either no intent to implement feature parity, or having had enough time & resources to do so without bothering to. Neither of those things are the case here - hence my breakdown. I've edited my comment to better address your particular point though, thanks.
pjerem 3y ago
That’s not entirely true. Most companies use multiple products even if they could use less. As an example, most companies using Zoom also use Slack. So they don’t use all the slack features although they could. Maybe because they think, for whatever reason, Zoom is better at conf call and Slack is better as chat application. The same is true with Teams, that basically any company owning office licences get for free and still prefer using something else (because it’s garbage). So if you can make a chat app that can make Slack look garbage as a chat app, you don’t need feature parity. Maybe adding an integration to external conf call services like Jitsi or Zoom can be enough for your potential customers, especially if they already pay for those.
- lolinder 3y ago
  I use Slack huddles regularly even though my company also has Zoom and Google Meet, and would be ticked off if my company tried to replace Slack with something that was missing voice. Slack's huddles are about eliminating the friction for hopping on a voice call. There's no waiting time for Zoom to start, no camera check, no "join with computer audio". You can go from a synchronous text-based conversation to a voice call in two seconds flat, as soon as it becomes obvious that's what is needed. That is the value proposition of Slack huddles, and external tools can't replace that.
  - holmesworcester 3y ago
    (Quiet founder here.) I think both this point and OP's point can be true, depending on what the value is that people get from switching from Slack to a secure alternative. (And yes I've also been in teams that usually used Zoom or Meet but where the convenience of quick 1:1 calls in Slack was really nice!) If a team is sufficiently desperate (as some we've talked to are) for something with end-to-end encryption but specific advanced moderation features that Signal lacks, then using Zoom, Meet, Signal, or some other video calling solution is fine. Sure it will be annoying, but there's a clear benefit the organization gets in return. And yes, most teams do not get enough value from e2ee (or don't yet believe that they do) that giving up on the frictionlessness of a Slack huddle is worth it for them. If we find product-market fit with an enthusastic niche of teams that need security, we'll be able to grow from there and address their needs for video calls too. If we can't find some users who are passionate about the particular advantages of what we're offering and willing to trade some features and convenience for those advantages, we're toast anyway :) (But we think we've found some!)

busssard 3y ago

Its an opensource project. Instead of complaining, why dont you implement it? ;)

hnarn 3y ago
Completely beside the point. The comment you’re replying to was simply questioning the headline.
- j_maffe 3y ago
  OP implies that the devs were the ones who wrote the headline though. They clearly stated that it is not (yet) a sound alternative to Discord.
  - plastic_bag 3y ago
    The About section of the repo literally says "A private, p2p alternative to Slack and Discord built on Tor & IPFS ". So the dev(s) are indeed claiming it's an alternative to both Slack and Discord.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
qabqabaca 3y ago
He’s not complaining about it missing the features he wants, he’s complaining about it missing features of the products it’s presenting itself as an alternative to
derelicta 3y ago
As much as I hate to say that, they are right. If you want to be a significant competitor to centralized plateforms, you gotta at least do as much at them.
- meiraleal 3y ago
  and from where would you start? How should the project be defined if they are yet not an alternative? The "soon to be if people contribute" P2P alternative to slack and discord?
mrd3v0 3y ago
As a major supporter of free software, I can't believe how many times I encounter this reply. No, not everyone has the resources nor skills to dedicate to a random unknown free software project online. Criticism is helpful and can inspire others who do have the time and skills to direct or fork the project into something more useful.
- notpushkin 3y ago
  Criticism can be helpful indeed; it's the form that triggers this kind of response. Let's try this one more time: > Very impressive project! It's neat that you can get this far without relying on any central servers at all. Personally though, I'm missing a couple more features – this only has textual chat and file sharing, while Discord or Slack have a lot more niche features. Achieving feature parity is a prerequisite for getting any user base nowadays, so I hope it is something team would account for before the 1.0 launch :-)
  - _factor 3y ago
    It’s incredible how tone-deaf to their own tone of voice people can be.
    - notpushkin 3y ago
      This happens sometimes, yeah. We're all just mere humans after all.
  - holmesworcester 3y ago
    (Quiet founder here) I agree with the objection that not everybody can just contribute patches for major features to an open source project, and I think it's fair to say that the comparison to Slack and Discord is not 1:1 without voice and video calls (which we do plan to offer someday, FWIW) and to feel disappointed by that. Though I think when an open source alternative emerges it is usually understood that it could take a while to get to feature parity, and we try to be very clear about what Quiet already does and doesn't do yet on our homepage. That said, Quiet is written in TypeScript and built on a web stack almost every engineer is somewhat familiar with, so it's really easy to get hacking on, and we'd love the help. :) Here are the instructions to build Quiet desktop: https://github.com/TryQuiet/quiet/blob/develop/packages/desktop/README.md https://github.com/TryQuiet/quiet/blob/develop/packages/desk... And here are some good first issues! https://github.com/orgs/TryQuiet/projects/3/views/1?filterQuery=good+label%3A%22good+first+issue%22 https://github.com/orgs/TryQuiet/projects/3/views/1?filterQu...
LoganDark 3y ago
This is an extremely toxic attitude and helps no one.

j_maffe 3y ago

They say so in the project description. I think they understand what constitutes a group messaging app. It is, however, something that can be built upon and improve. That's how open source works, you have to start with just the basics. Still, it's a very good step in the right direction.

holmesworcester 3y ago
(Quiet founder here.) Yes, this! Based on our research with users who need sensitive communications, a working Slack or Discord alternative without video calling is desperately needed by some teams right now. (For example, teams who want end-to-end encryption but have a big community with highly specific moderation and vetting needs.) So starting with text, images, audio messages, etc. can get us a foothold and we can build from there. Just getting Quiet working as reliably as a centralized chat app on iOS and Android and finishing things like multi-party e2ee group chats with multiple device linking is going to be a big lift that could easily take us 6 months or more. Group video calls can come after that if our initial early adopters are asking for it!

ThatPlayer 3y ago

I don't agree that you need feature parity to be an alternative though. If your use-case is only text chat and file sharing, then it is an alternative. LibreOffice is still an alternative of Microsoft Office without having all the features. Firefox is an alternative of Chrome without WebHID or Web Bluetooth.

Brybry 3y ago
Discord's key features are chat and VoIP. File sharing is barely meaningful, except that it means not needing to use external image hosts for gifs/memes/pet pics. Discord's initial pull was from gamers who were using teamspeak/ventrilo/mumble + twitch chat and maybe IRC. If it doesn't do VoIP then it's not a viable alternative to Discord. It'd be like if LibreOffice couldn't save new files or if Firefox couldn't render images or video.
- circuit10 3y ago
  I’m someone who uses Discord but (almost) never uses voice chat. To me it’s a text chat platform. This isn’t true for everyone but I feel like it is for a lot of people
  - Brybry 3y ago
    But think about why you're now using Discord instead of IRC or a forum: it's because of the users who were also pulled in for the core VoIP feature and because users would rather use one program than multiple. I didn't stop using Mumble or IRC because they couldn't, combined, meet my needs. I even prefer them to Discord on a principle basis. But everyone I wanted to communicate with moved to Discord because it was easier -- as it had both core features which are necessary for gamers.
    - croes 3y ago
      >But everyone I wanted to communicate with moved to Discord because it was easier -- as it had both core features which are necessary for gamers That's the real reason why you use Discord. Peer pressure. Discord is in no way a replacement for a forum

KoftaBob 3y ago

If we want to be pedantic about it, then let's call it an "Imperfect Substitute" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitute_good#Imperfect_substitutes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitute_good#Imperfect_subs...

ilyt 3y ago

And you don't just need to check a checkbox but implement them well stares at MS Teams vomits

meiraleal 3y ago

That's the magic of free software. It would only have feature parity so early on if it was VC-backed, which would not make any sense.

holmesworcester 3y ago

Quiet founder here! First, the big advantage of Quiet over IRC is that Quiet has eventual consistency built on a CRDT, so you'll sync messages sent while you were offline. In a team chat setting this is really useful and was one of Slack's big draws when it launched, as I remember it. Re: video calling -- end-to-end encrypted voice and video calls (or channels, huddles, what have you) are actually something we plan to add someday, as we've had users asking for it. Right now many voice and video calls are at least partly peer-to-peer, so with some caveats a p2p video calling solution is actually more straightforward than p2p chat. The caveats are: 1. We wouldn't want to use Tor, at least in its current form, because its multiple hops and lack of UDP support will increase latency, so you wouldn't get the same metadata privacy. 2. Larger group calls (>10 voice participants, >3 video participants) may well require a server, since the standard solution for pure p2p group calling is for all participants to stream pairwise to all participants, so the number of participants is limited by the upstream bandwidth of the slowest participant divided by the stream bitrate. 3. Even small group video calls often require a relay server sometimes, because roughly 10-20% of peers in real world settings cannot make direct connections to each other even with holepunching techniques. (A classic scenario: two peers on the same public wifi, when the router's security settings prohibit local connections, will need a reliable external server to send all the data.) So our current plan is to offer voice and video calling (and any other features that require a server, like file storage beyond the capacity of the network's devices) as a paid subscription feature. Picture a freemium SaaS product where the free version is open source, forkable, and fully reliable in its p2p form without any support from us. This gives users a lot of power to keep us honest, but it would let people pay us for stuff you really want a server for. All that said, maybe somebody will come up with a great p2p, large-group video calling solution with reliable decentralized holepunching and we can use that approach! (But I'm not holding my breath!)

37469920away 3y ago
Always good to have alternatives. Thanks for your work and good luck.
- holmesworcester 3y ago

lucideer 3y ago

Understanding feature parity is about: 1. Can the protocol support it (well) 2. Is the tech mature enough / is there enough contributors to ensure the client adds support For a new tech only the first bullet point is relevant - from a brief scan it seems like a hopeful but emphatic yes. I guess there's a third soft question which is, does the project have the branding, polish, marketing clout to gain traction: much harder to gauge but looks polished at least.

lolinder 3y ago
What you're defining is possible future feature parity, not feature parity. A project does not have feature parity until the features are actually built—promises that the features are possible and if you really wanted it you could build it yourself are nice in their own way, but they're not features.
- lucideer 3y ago
  You're technically correct (the best kind of correct), but in the context of this comment thread the comment I was replying to said: > many messaging softwares seem to not understand what feature parity is. That implies either no intent to implement feature parity, or having had enough time & resources to do so without bothering to. Neither of those things are the case here - hence my breakdown. I've edited my comment to better address your particular point though, thanks.

pjerem 3y ago

That’s not entirely true. Most companies use multiple products even if they could use less. As an example, most companies using Zoom also use Slack. So they don’t use all the slack features although they could. Maybe because they think, for whatever reason, Zoom is better at conf call and Slack is better as chat application. The same is true with Teams, that basically any company owning office licences get for free and still prefer using something else (because it’s garbage). So if you can make a chat app that can make Slack look garbage as a chat app, you don’t need feature parity. Maybe adding an integration to external conf call services like Jitsi or Zoom can be enough for your potential customers, especially if they already pay for those.

lolinder 3y ago
I use Slack huddles regularly even though my company also has Zoom and Google Meet, and would be ticked off if my company tried to replace Slack with something that was missing voice. Slack's huddles are about eliminating the friction for hopping on a voice call. There's no waiting time for Zoom to start, no camera check, no "join with computer audio". You can go from a synchronous text-based conversation to a voice call in two seconds flat, as soon as it becomes obvious that's what is needed. That is the value proposition of Slack huddles, and external tools can't replace that.
- holmesworcester 3y ago
  (Quiet founder here.) I think both this point and OP's point can be true, depending on what the value is that people get from switching from Slack to a secure alternative. (And yes I've also been in teams that usually used Zoom or Meet but where the convenience of quick 1:1 calls in Slack was really nice!) If a team is sufficiently desperate (as some we've talked to are) for something with end-to-end encryption but specific advanced moderation features that Signal lacks, then using Zoom, Meet, Signal, or some other video calling solution is fine. Sure it will be annoying, but there's a clear benefit the organization gets in return. And yes, most teams do not get enough value from e2ee (or don't yet believe that they do) that giving up on the frictionlessness of a Slack huddle is worth it for them. If we find product-market fit with an enthusastic niche of teams that need security, we'll be able to grow from there and address their needs for video calls too. If we can't find some users who are passionate about the particular advantages of what we're offering and willing to trade some features and convenience for those advantages, we're toast anyway :) (But we think we've found some!)