I have been interested in starting a hobby project that could one day maybe become something more.<p>I've been considering a Discord alternative as 1 possibility of a project and to do a few things differently.<p>MS Teams and Slack still seem more business oriented still. I have heard of Revolt but it feels like it's going just direct Discord Alternative, and not trying to change it up too much, at least not yet.<p>What features would you consider a worthwhile differentiator instead of doing 'more of the same' that discord wouldn't likely ever do?<p>Obviously, aside from all the standard-esque things from text to voice, etc..<p>The few features that could make a discord alt more compelling of a platform.<p>1. More public facing community features (Don't be a blackhole of information).
e.g. Allow public facing announcements/channels to be viewable without an account on the web. Some game companies use Discord to share announcements/patch notes but having to 'have an account, join a server, to view patch notes'. This blackhole of information just feels challenging for no good reason.<p>2. Allow a few more 'advanced users' type scenarios, even if it results in inconsistent or degraded user experiences. e.g. Allow P2P video screen sharing without needing to go thru middle re-broadcast. I know this doesn't scale with multiple consumers but with 1-2 proper users it be allowable. Saves a lot of upfront server $.<p>3. Support Channel/Chat aggregation (mostly cosmetic). Have a single view for quickly going between channels/private messages. Without having to go to each individual server first.<p># Differentation<p>What features would you consider a worthwhile differentiator instead of doing 'more of the same' that discord is ever likely to do?<p>Also, any recommendations on technologies or frameworks to help me jumpstart? I have my professional strengths, but would rather stay open minded to all suggestions.
I am not enough of a Discord ninja to really provide an apples-to-apples of many of those things, but I can say with the highest confidence that Zulip addresses #1 in such a stellar way it actually <i>pains</i> me how much the open source community ignores using it in favor of fucking Slack or fucking Discord, where, yes, information goes to die<p>I also believe they address the P2P video <<a href="https://zulip.com/features/#:~:text=Voice%20and%20video" rel="nofollow">https://zulip.com/features/#:~:text=Voice%20and%20video</a>> but they offload that to Jitsi rather than trying to reinvent the wheel<p>They don't even have to host Zulip themselves, as zulip.com offers free hosting for open source communities. Just pains me
I think support for multidimensional ratings would be a game changer.<p>Instead of forcing everyone into a binary or handful of reactions to a post, imagine if you could rank something as funny, what language it's written in, the quality of the post, if it's spam, if it contains a picture of kittens, <i>or any other thing the user cares about</i>.