Hello all! I am an aspiring newbie developer and I want to share my creation with others. I am a super introverted nerd and don’t use much social media so I am just going to places where I think other fellow nerds might see.
What I have been working on for the past year is my discord alternative. I call it GoodComms https://goodcomms.app
I love self hosting everything and I used to run teamspeak servers for years until discord replaced them. I don’t hate discord entirely but I hate that I can’t self host. I am not much of a programmer but with how AI has changed recently I was able to get something off the ground and working pretty well recently. I have been testing with friends for the past month or so as I find an fix things but I think I am ready to share it with others.
So that’s why I released it last weekend.
Currently it has chat and voice channel support along with screen sharing with audio streaming on windows and screen sharing without audio streaming fully on linux.
You can make channels text/voice. I plan to have more customization and pretty up the UI but the important things for me were Privacy, Security, Performance.
I started with a basic IRC concept and built up and out from there trying to account for scale and performance. The server is basically a relay and the clients do all the work for encoding/decoding when video streaming so it’s not perfect but I like the system I made. My server is a simple 1GB of Ram an 1 VCPU and it has no issues with multiple video streams an people in a channel.
I have only tested with my small group of friends though, I need to know what breaks an what doesn’t now.
It is free for anyone to download and use. There is no telemetry or cloud connection reliance unless you want gif support, but that is optional an up to server owners to setup.
Please let me know what you think and use github for issues.
Thanks!
Thank you! I can answer any questions about it. I just got it to a nice point that I felt like sharing a couple weeks ago. It was a long few months getting it to this point and I have been using it for communication with my friends. I plan to update this post as make additional releases and try to explain my process as a newbie developer just entering into this space.
Looks kinda interesting, though I haven’t done more than a cursory glance – it’d be really nice to see a few things:
Screenshots? A lot of this kind of software can really benefit from seeing the look and feel before getting into it (and if the UI is a moving target, you can put that as an asterisk on it)
AI disclosure on your site.
Source code - I read the software license in your github and it seems like it’s not supposed to be open source?
In lieu of that, if you want to commercialize your app, you should document the protocols and data flows that you’re using so people have an idea of how you’re achieving your claims.
Maybe put up a quick feature table or comparison to other Discord alternatives, since this is a hot topic right now for folks
Roadmap for features will help folks know where you’re at and what you plan. Can also do the opposite and explicitly state what is beyond your scope so you don’t get constant questions to do things you don’t want to.
Thank you for the feedback. I’ll try to answer your questions here somewhat too..
Screenshots seem so obvious, I will try to come up with something that shows it off. UI is not what I am proud of, it’s more a functioning than pretty app at the moment
AI disclosure. I will admit freely I used AI to help me generate code. I am not a programmer but I am a lifelong nerd who has a decent understanding of computer science. I just wanted to create my idea in my head an bring it to life since AI can really help with that. I spent the past year working and refining this project with the help of AI. So some may call it vibe coded slop and I am ok with that. I know what I did and the architecture and the process it took to get here. I am proud of the software. I think it achieves something that I haven’t seen others accomplish in this space. As far as a disclosure goes, what does that typically look like? Just stating how or where I used AI?
This is not an open source project. I am just releasing it freely and if I ever get bored or tired of working on it then I would gladly open source it. For now though I want to maintain control of the project and I might find commercial applications for it where I can make custom forks or something. I will always release server and clients freely for anyone to host.
I will document the architecture better with more documentation.
Feature table is excellent feedback as well!
Yes a roadmap, I have more internal documentation that I use to keep track so I will share and refine it for public viewing.
The fact that it is vibe coded and it isn’t even source available is a huge turnoff to me. But I’m still curious if you’re going to implement some kind of API for it and/or if you’re going to make plugins an option. This is relevant for me, as I would like to have some options for centrally managing user rights and would like to be able to interface bi-directionally with the server from certain games.
