Mildly reminds me how being online on AIM or ICQ was an actual invitation to chat. I had so many interesting conversations with people I barely knew.
There's no source of that signal that someone is open to chitchat these days, and it's in my opinion kind of killed what was once great about online communication.
This is something I've always wanted to write about, and I imagine that someday I'll end up with a long article, but basically, it's the idea that the internet used to be offline by default, and now it's online by default.
People used to be offline by default. You had to “connect to the internet.” Open MSN, go into forums and check the latest unread messages, come back from a concert and manually upload the photos to your Fotolog or wherever. Now it's the opposite. We are online by default. The expectation is that we're always connected and respond quickly. Going to a sports event or a concert? You have to post a story to Instagram from that very place, not when you get home. Someone sends you an email or a WhatsApp message? You’re expected to reply as soon as possible.
That’s what I miss most about the internet—the idea and the feeling that I would go online when I wanted to, not that I lived inside the internet 24/7.
Like many who lived through this inversion I can absolutely relate.
I've culled my notifications substantially and my life is better for it. But I miss that feeling of firing up AIM and seeking out someone to chat with. Or someone spotting my arrival and immediately saying hi.
I realized yesterday that I don't use phones like others do. I want to be in airplane mode whenever my phone is locked. Not Do Not Disturb mode. I want my modem off. I don't want any phone calls, ever. I'll get to your messages when my flow state has subsided.
But when I unlock the phone, I want the modem to automatically come back on. I am subliminally tapping into the heyday of AIM. I'm expressing "i'm free. what's up?!".
Problem is, it's not an occasion to anyone else out there. Most people always want to be available and I have a hard time understanding why.
> I realized yesterday that I don't use phones like others do. I want to be in airplane mode whenever my phone is locked. Not Do Not Disturb mode. I want my modem off. I don't want any phone calls, ever. I'll get to your messages when my flow state has subsided.
You're not alone. Here's how I solved it: Last year I really wanted a new smartphone just for the better camera. My existing phone from 2018 was still working fine, but the camera sucked.
So I bought a used, but only few months old, new smartphone.
And I never got it hooked up to the cell network (i.e. no SIM card). I now typically carry two phones on me. The old one is for texts/phones. The new one is for everything else. A clean separation. At times when I do groceries or something, I leave the SIM phone in the car so no one can contact me.
When the old phone finally dies, I'll just find the cheapest smartphone to replace it and maintain the separation.
For app notifications, I use the Buzzkill app to keep them down. For a long time I had it set up such that I would not get any notification for texts - other than a vibration. No sound. No flashing LED. And no notification in the task bar. If I wanted to know if I'd received a text, I'd have to open the app. I strongly encourage this set up.
Before I got a smartphone, I would turn my cell phone on only for emergencies and the occasional coordination (picking someone up - call him and let him know I'm downstairs). I told people they wouldn't be able to reach me on my cell phone, and to call my home phone (landline, and then VoIP) if they needed me.
Then I finally got a smartphone. I still have that home phone. But boy, I often tell people that my life is definitely worse because of that smartphone. I like the portable computing device, camera and GPS. Just not the phone part!
I have been considering this. I even came up with a name: Good Phone, Bad Phone. Your experience is instructive, thank you. Other than the additional cost, I think it has lots of upside.
I daily drive a Pixel on GrapheneOS and most of what I install is from F-Droid repos. I'm wondering if I should just de-SIM that one to make it 'Good Phone' and my 'Bad Phone' should just be a Light Phone or maybe something more featureful.
Definitely of a similar mindset... my text notification chime is about as subdued as I can make it... I mean I don't want to miss a text entirely, but would really rather push it all off. I disabled email notifications and other app notifications entirely. I wouldn't disable my actual phone calls, though I don't like that nearly half the calls I get are either spam, or bots notifying my of dr appts.
It's all gotten so dysfunctional as a whole. My SO gets on Tiktok live chats (whatever they're called) and I'll get into an X space now and then. Once in a great while, I'll pull up IRC. I really do miss the days of AIM an Yahoo Messenger chat groups though. It was fun. I also miss the locality of BBSing back when. With the internet, we tend to segregate based on interest, and you lose the local aspects and actual interaction, get togethers, etc.
This. I don't even want my computer to send data / check email unless I tell it to. And I ESPECIALLY don't want it sending telemetry / receiving ads asynchronously.
This is basically how computers in the 80s and part of the 90s worked.
I wonder if we could really bring back modems and BBS. How could we make that happen again? I feel like with modern internet, we’re stuck in this streaming TV, social media daze.
Phone makers keep touting AI features in their phones, but I haven't seen anyone applying it to notifications.
Here's my holy grail: the phone should, using on-device processing determine whether I want to be disturbed with a given notification now, when I'm not busy, at a specified time of day, or never.
Here reveals the crux of the engagement economy. You want to use your phone less and more meaningfully. EVERY SINGLE COMPANY wants the exact opposite for their bottom line.
Their request could be handled by a slightly complex ML model, usage over time by dumb if else statements in an on device program, or trivially by Ollama on a mid computer hosted on a home server.
The default doesn't have to be that all the data must be fed up to a company, computers can actually do a lot without it coming from someone else's server.
Privacy is long dead and you are not getting it back. If someone wants to buy comprehensive data about your personal life there is literally nothing you can do about it. The data broker economy is absolutely booming and no one is even making a token effort to curtail it. The government that is supposed to stop it wants it for themselves so they won't ever do anything.
I wrote that I want it to use on-device processing. I probably should have added that I don't want it to subsequently send the data used for that to the vendor or a third party, but I thought it was implied.
The Internet used to be semi literally a place you went - a desktop in the corner of some room, not central on a desk, not in your pocket. And with a ritual to access it on top of that and the dial up sounds and all.
It's more present but also more invisible now, yeah.
It's funny -- before social media, I was more likely able to go find someone to chat with on IRC, a Usenet group, or some purpose-built forum. I knew where my friends were (ICQ, then AIM, then Skype, then GChat), and it worked.
Now, it's all fragmented into 1000 Discord servers, and who has the time to dig through it all?
I agree, I feel similarly. There are now 25+ car groups on fbook that I have to subscribe to, because the main web-board / usenet group for that car doesn't get anywhere near as much traffic as it used to. Major vendors are providing support on fbook - which sucks.
See, I'm the opposite. I've got a Discord server, which are very much "where my friends are": If I make an acquaintance (or any of my friends do), they get added to the server. Some stick around, and get woven into the social fiber. Some never come back, and eventually get removed from the server during our annual purge. There's maybe 10-20 active people (i.e., people we see at least a couple times a month), a handful of regulars that are that multiple times a week, and then maybe twice all that again of people we hear from once in a blue moon. If I want to chat, I'll hop in voice. If I want to share something I found, I'll stick it in a text channel.
There's still plenty of communities on the internet. It's just that the communities worth belonging to are not wide open to the public. Community building does not scale.
honestly ive been thinking about this stuff too. a hypothetical forum you could only log on to read if you idled on a certain page for 15 mins or something would probably have a lot higher standard of discussion and be a lot better for peoples lives, for example.
The most minute of barriers requiring you to deliberately and consciously join and leave...
This is most definitely an invitation to abuse your phone’s battery, but at the same time I absolutely love this idea. It’s hilarious to imagine someone eagerly awaiting the chance to log onto the site as the battery dips from 8, to 7, to 6. “Just a couple more minutes…”
The SomethingAwful forums have been $10 to join since 2001. If you get banned, that's another $10 needed for a new account. Has worked pretty well for 24 years.
I play badminton, which has games that are about ten minutes long. I've noticed an uptick in the number of times I've had to stop and wait for someone I'm playing with to read a message on their smartwatch. I'm terminally online, but I can disconnect long enough for a game or a film - I seem to be increasingly in the minority.
Honestly I don't hang out with people like that. If you can't put down your Distractify 9000 to play a game with me, then clearly I am not very interesting to you and it's better for both of us to do more engaging activities with more engaging people.
People bristle at this sometimes- they'll ask why we don't hang out as much and I'll explain- and like, I get it, nobody likes feeling called out or criticized, and I don't even mean it as criticism, not really. Your behavior in reaching for your phone tells me that you have more important things to do, and I don't want to obstruct you from them. If those things aren't actually more important, well, then your priorities are clearly out of wack and you should sort that out for yourself.
Like just... stop responding to stimuli. Put things in the order in which they are meaningful to you, and then keep that. You're a conscious being, act like one.
I think there's a mismatch of expectations which is a solid reason to pursue friendships elsewhere. I think the other party in scenarios like this probably assumes (incorrectly of course) that youappreciate the break so you can check your phone too.
There's definitely something borked with our brains though. I have had multiple people express surprise when I tell them that I will not check any notifications when I'm driving even if I'm stopped at a traffic light for a minute or more. I just don't want to be distracted, and yeah it takes conscious effort sometimes, but it does get easier once you learn from experience that the world will not fall apart if you check your messages later.
I even internally reframe it as future candy, which makes me engage more positively with async interactions. But practicing delayed gratification is hard.
I will let android auto read text messages and/or dictate to me and do phone calls at times - but it has to be hands-free and traffic not too bad. I almost never do anything with my phone at a red light.
> Now it's the opposite. We are online by default. The expectation is that we're always connected and respond quickly.
I've been reading this on HN for years but I've always been puzzled by it because it's both so different from my personal experiences and seems so divergent from the types who hang out on HN.
From around my mid-20s the expectation to be always on in any of my friend groups just evaporated. Until we hit our 30s there was still a general expectation to read socials after work hours but even then as we got older many of us were too drained after work to do much. Then once we hit our 30s the expectation was that our partners, homes, and often kids took precedence. None of my friends are posting Stories on Instagram with their newborns.
Now some of my friends do still love being always on their socials but a lot of these friends of mine when not on socials are constantly hanging out at social events or on calls with each other. They'd probably be the neighborhood gossips in an era before telephony.
So I'm curious: is this a real problem or is this a bit of a strawman? What sort of social pressure do you actually receive to be always on your socials? Is this related to going on dates?
> The expectation is that we're always connected and respond quickly
As someone who twenty years ago published his XMPP presence to his web page (http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2006/02/27/jabber...) among other oversharing excesses, I have now swung opposite: online presence indicator is the first functionality I disable when I join any sort of forum and my tablet is almost always silent... Asynchronous interrupts least and unbroken concentration is most valuable, so asynchronous mostly - with exceptions for eligible professional contacts and sentimentally close people.
I am happy to disappoint these expectations. I feel no pressure from it whatsoever. Of course, I'm of the age of default offline, so that has a lot to do with it. Remember coming home to a "machine" to check messages? That was glorious even if it too had a glowing red dot that wanted your attention.
The always on mentality is not worth it and quite tiresome, figuratively and literally. I know it's different for women, but I've met a few that are really into the always on concept where they never leave the house without full war paint because "you never know who you might meet". I'm exhausted just thinking about it.
Back then Broadcast/Multicast (1 to all/1 to many) was expensive. It quite often resulted in routers and switches catching fire. The chips were too slow.
A side effect was we didn't have to deal with what Claude Shannon told us happens if everyone is broadcasting - noise increases - no one is really heard - people speak louder - people repeat messages - everyone is getting their energy drained.
Today Broadcast is free. And thats what we see happening.
We used to relay messages in a mailbox once per day and got all new ones (called "Maustausch" https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MausNet). It was pretty cheap because all group and personal messages came in one compressed batch and you had stuff to read and respond for a day. The BBSes exchanged all messages in a tree call hierarchy, you could reach everybody within that one day hop.
Usable mobile data that was fast enough was one of the tipping points, meeting with the first smartphone that was for the many, the iPhone around the same time.
I have a theory: what was scarce once, is not anymore.
Social networks make people tired/satisfied/overwhelmed of "interacting online", and in the worst possible way: passively, not producing anything and just consuming it.
The “satisfied” part is the most harmful imo. This is what causes lack of actual social interaction and real friendships. Loneliness is on the rise as friendships are on a decline, this is a byproduct of social media gratification
The other more obviously negative components tired/overwhelmed are more of a hangover effect people have after over indulgence. But they’re addicted so ultimately always go back for more (most people).
It’s weird for me to witness as I never indulged in social media and could always see it for what it is. I watched my wife use and just classified it as a huge waste of time (and had some not so fun, “get off your phone” conversations along the way). Some people are finally coming around to it but a lot of damage has been done and a lot of social fabric has eroded.
I'm not sure the tired/overwhelmed hangover effect is necessarily from social media. I like to think most of my time spent on the internet is productive,reading documentation and cs articles/papers for the most part and i still get that hangover feeling.
That’s mental fatigue from learning and being engaged on a topic for a duration. Maybe some additional from screen time/blue light fatigue. But it used to happen after studying for hours pre-internet.
Just my hunch, but post student life, I think many people are not actually using the internet regularly the way you describe. Only a small percentage of people are doing productive tasks, it’s mostly leisurely consumption
There's a noticeable difference to me between exercising my thinking skills and feeling mentally exhausted versus consuming lots of media and feeling "hungover".
I get that exhausted feeling after any hard day at work. On the other hand, scrolling through reels for about 30 minutes gives me a headache. If I spend over an hour on YouTube, I also get a similar feeling, but only if that time was spent watching many different videos. If I watched one 2 hour video, I feel fine.
True in real life, too. Whenever someone random comes up to me and tries to engage in a conversation, my guard goes up because 9 times out of 10, they are trying to sell me something or scam me. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a woman, where your “safety” alarms are also sounding.
Spontaneous, innocent chit chat is dead, both online and offline because everyone’s hustling now.
Counter example: yesterday I took the train and ferry from london to dublin. Trains are a great way to meet new people, especially if you're sitting facing each other. Person opposite me was interested in the maths book my son was reading. Turns out he's an interrailing applied maths student from Scandinavia. We had a great chat for hours and exchanged numbers. My faith in humanity is not dead yet.
Counter-counter example. When my wife was new to the city she took a bus ride and a girl randomly made contact with her. They hit it off and talked for the whole ride. My wife thought this girl sounds really nice, they actually got into deep conversations, and wanted to exchange numbers so they could hang out some time. Then she asked if she had heard about the book of mormons…
It sucks because the social aspect of social media has been bent and twisted into squeezing every bit of money out of it. In some regards, people are being forced to consume. Companies do anything they can to manipulate users into continual consumption because it generates money for them.
Even worse now? Companies are rewarding people when users interact with their content. Now people are enticed to create content that purposely angers people so they comment on their content.
I've deleted all of my accounts now - it was just too fatiguing to try and weed your way through the constant pushing of content to get you to watch or interact with instead of what YOU want to see or watch. YouTube is notorious for that. How many times have you gone to the site and instead of searching for something you went there for, you get completely sidelined into something because they present you with a ton of videos that fit what you're interested in?
In the immortal words of Joshua: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?"
Discord indicates who's online with the green dot.
It can be modified to never show you're online, or show 'away' or something, but it's similar. It also displays how many are online in a channel on a server, and then you can open the list.
Despite that, however, it still feels 'different' to how it was, but I think we're also 'different'. Being (significantly) older now I have more responsibilities and pressures for my time so I'm less likely (like zero chance) to be sitting idle waiting for random chats.
We'd have to ask those who are, now, the age we were then - but then they also have no frame of reference. My son is often chatting to his friends online, but I think they're exclusively friends from meatspace rather than electronic strangers.
Yeah, and the channels that are available... well, here's an example. I'm a member of a couple of professional WhatsApp groups... both of which are so notification heavy that I've permanently muted them, and therefore never visit and as a result derive no benefit from. And, at least for me, there's something about WhatsApp that makes it unamenable to the kind of dip in and out interaction you used to get with IM services. I want to be there when I'm there and not disturbed when I'm not.
That's the problem with phone apps. They either spam you with notifications or you forget to open them. Desktop IRC clients were more available for passive checking whenever you glanced at the window, but out of the way otherwise.
You can treat whatsapp as an irc client, it's all in your head :)
I have multiple friend groups on whatsapp - i just check them once in a while to see if anything interesting was posted. All the chat apps I'm on are muted and the mute is muted again to make sure.
Yes, If you purposely turn off all notifications on your phone, and/or live on DND mode 24/7, you quickly learn to adapt to this world where using the internet is a deliberate action. Sanity sets in: you are deciding when to use your phone or computer, not an algorithm, or other people. You’re back in the driver’s seat, like it’s 2002 again! It’s very freeing.
I remember the early days of Skype and Google talk, calling random strangers and… actually having a conversation with them. I remember they were always confused and surprised to get a random call from a stranger, but were almost always happy to chat anyway!
I've used the username "donatj" basically everywhere since the late 1990s with just a couple exceptions.
Dude beat me to it on Skype, I called him just out of the blue and had a nice conversation with him, lived in Denmark as I recall. Really friendly guy. I can't imagine doing that now though, let alone the person on the other end actually picking up.
Yeah, I've thought this for a while now. It's like it used to be you either were available to chat or you weren't, but now it's like everyone is half-available at all times. I agree with other commenters that the fact that you had to be sitting at a desktop was also a factor. Finishing what you were doing and logging into AIM (or taking down your away message) was the equivalent of opening your door, going into the lounge/breakroom, etc. --- a signal of openness to interaction.
Disagree. There are people open to chitchat right now. They are just young. We just grew old, most of us are having families, and it would be weird to idly chitchat instead of playing your family role.
Inreally enjoyed that, especially on ICQ. My first real job was a night operations role at a reservation services company, managing incidents and doing database maintenance work.
There was alot of waiting involved, and I would chat on icq with a lot of random people in Europe. I ended up meeting one person!
The problem is… people are people and do nasty things. I have a good friend who is a few years younger. She found herself on the “information superhighway” at 13-14, blue collar parents who had no idea what she was doing alone on AIM or what that was. She find herself meeting this charming guy… who happened to be in his 30’s.
Learning about how common that was was very sobering… as this thing that represented fun and friends to me ended up being malevolent to many.
Huh, coming from an IRC and email background I have the opposite reaction. Rather than having to wait until someone is online it is much nicer to just type to them and they'll respond once they can. Everyone is open all the time!
Some people used AIM like this as well, at least I did. I left my computer on all the time, so I was always online.
I was in college during the peak of AIM and it was useful to know who was at their computer or not, which I believe was still viable. Around meal times, we could quickly scan for who was around to see if they wanted to head down to the cafeteria. If they weren’t around, there was no point it asking. For time sensitive messages, online status matters.
AIM also had useful states. If you were away for a decent chunk of time (And you could configure what that amount of time was!) it would mark you as idle, and you could set custom away messages (That were actually visible) so folks could know why you were away, or more realistically, what song was on your mind.
Nowadays the status is completely meaningless. It's a small dot that doesn't accurately reflect your status, and if you choose to set a message, most of the apps hide it anyway.
Now that I think about it, that's true. The same of IRC and MSN Messenger. Since being online all the time was not the default state of things, people only turned those applications (or even their computers) on when they actually wanted to chat to other people. When you saw your friend online on one of those, you immediately wrote something to them, even if you didn't really have anything to say, because what was the point of having the application on otherwise?
Would anyone still use a desktop-only (no mobile) messenger where you have to run/turn on intentionally (not always-on like most mobile-first messengers nowadays), lists online/offline friends the way AIM/ICQ did, and you can only send messages with online friends?
I get that most leisure computing has moved off of desktop to mobile in modern days, but there's definitely enough of us nerds who're on a computer a lot (even if just for work, if nothing else). It can't be any less than in the late 1990s when ICQ was popular.
I think it probably is less. I’d hang out on my laptop in the evenings and mornings (like, while watching TV or reading news when eating breakfast) in a way I don’t now. I use my iPad or phone now.
I do wonder, though, if there’s a gap for a messenger app that runs only while in the foreground in your phone [edit: or tablet or computer!] - or maybe until you next lock the screen, so you can ‘be online’ only while reading, playing a game, or doomscrolling.
I might relate to this, but I also spent more time talking to friends on the phone 20 years ago. The perception of this greatness can't be disentangled from the experience of youth.
My group of friends gets something really close to OP, because of our music bot (Which only pings everyone on specific events, like the music queue running out, uncommon enough that it doesn't get annoying, and never more than once a session)
Our friend group's social contract is to sit in a discord channel (even if empty) if you're open to chatting. Unfortunately we have no real equivalent for text.
well part of it was there wasnt ^{10}10 = 10^{10^{10^{10^{10^{10^{10^{10^{10^{10}}}}}}}}} more interesting things than chatting with your friends to do online
There are a billion communities using discord and telegram to do basically what you’re describing - topic rooms, hangout rooms, you can change your online status to signal your willingness to ge sociable.
> I also had this idea to turn this into an IoT device that has 5 RGB lights and sits on your desk. It would light up when each friend you have delegated joins your Discord voice channel and you could customize the colour for each friend. If I get some traction I might turn it into a real product, so email me at my email address in my about page if that seems something you'd like.
Hah, I'm also building something like this for notification purposes. My wife's tablet sometimes doesn't show notifications and she's often not near her phone, so I ordered some ESP32's and LED boards[0]. Going to scatter them around the house and link them to a switch in Home Assistant so I can light them up if I need to get a hold of her. I'm planning a back-and-forth scan effect to make sure they're eye-catching, already named them Cylons.
My partner is disabled, and my home office is far enough from the bedroom/her work desk that I sometimes can't hear her when she could use, wants, or needs help. These very different priorities make messaging me difficult for her sometimes, not to mention that I can't know what the urgency is if she messages me over SMS/Signal/etc.
As a result, we were looking into a very similar system where we each have an LED signboard, speaker, and priority lights on the top of a small device that lives on top of our monitors along with an app where she can select "not urgent, but you should know", "when you have a moment", "as soon as you can", and "urgent, right now" in an app, with an optional message, and the device makes a tone and lights the lights associated with the most recent, highest priority message as well as reminding every five minutes.
I'm playing with an ESP32 right now to implement, but it's nice to see that the entire concept isn't entirely unprecidented.
That’s a great idea! I remember on an Android phone - maybe Galaxy Nexus, or the original Pixel - you could blink an LED with different colors for different app notifications. I had blue, yellow, red, and green for various apps, and so without ever having the screen turn on or the device make sounds, I could tell if I should bother to check.
To me, not having any sensory disabilities, that’s a lower cognitive load than banners or other text/icon-based notifications.
The Nexus One [1] from 2010 had a little trackball that could light up for notifications.
While the trackball was understandably nixed in later models (though it was still useful for fine control!), its notification feature is dearly missed.
The first Android phone I owned also had this feature, and it was super helpful.
It's a shame that our phones are becoming more and more voracious surveillance devices without the common courtesy of doing things that are helpful for the user.
I’ve built a few things like this using Nerves / Elixir on a pi. It’s got a really nice dev experience through to useful deployment and over-the-air updates.
I highly recommend it to anyone building little functional prototypes of this sort.
If you have Apple devices and share your locations in Find My, she could use the Find My app to make your devices beep loudly and optionally show a message. Great for urgency, since the beep is really loud and doesn’t stop until you tell it to.
Your current setup is, of course, much more interesting.
Or just get a $5 radio doorbell. You know, when it's 'urgent, right now' you don't want to learn what you are too late because for whatever reason internet/wireless/cellular wasn't working.
This ^ anything else is just wanting to play with tech instead of solving the problem immediately. Which is fine, sure, but that radio doorbell (or better, 3 different ones for different priority levels, since it seems important) will fix the issue right now.
I've not looked at this space - but with flexible control software, such devices could serve a very wide variety of use cases. And perhaps multiple uses cases simultaneously, far less intrusively than dealing with a variety of alarm & alert systems.
While this is a pretty cool hardware project, I would be quite annoyed to be your partner. No offense, but it almost reads as satire that you want to flash LEDs in every corner of the house if your wife doesn't look at her phone notifications quickly enough.
They said a status board on top of their monitor, not every corner of their house. This seems like a very unobtrusive signal to me. Plus, some people like to hide or obscure their phone from their field of view during work, to minimize distractions. Honestly, the only person I immediately check my phone for is my wife. If I could have a priority indicator along with that, I’d love it. There are some things I need to know immediately (a kid is sick and one of us needs to pick them up, etc.) regardless of what I’m doing, and there are others where it can wait until I’m done with a meeting.
I thought it went without saying that she's on board with it, and that "need to get a hold of her" meant e.g. "I'm trying to call her but she's out in the shop". 99% of our communication during the day is asynchronous.
I don’t have hearing loss but the best way I’ve found to not miss important notifications is a smart watch. Game changing to ensure my wife and I don’t miss each other’s messages around school pickup or anything else important. With an apple watch you can make the vibration pretty unmissable. We both have almost all other notifications silenced so it’s not overly noisy either. I never use sound for any kind of notification anymore - even when expecting important calls.
I think Discord is the best chat app for friend groups and it's not even close. At this point I've written the following bots specifically for my friend group's server:
# Music Quiz Bot
Existing apps work ok. A lot of paid and don't let you use a specific Spotify playlist.
The only thing annoying about this one is that none of the Discord API wrappers handle audio very well so I've found that this one gets a bit flaky if you're trying to play a lot.
This one is probably like 500 lines of Typescript but a lot of that is for the Spotify API. The game logic is pretty minimal.
# Birthday Bot
This is like 10 lines of Python. It's a cron that reads from a Google Sheet my friends and I keep up to date with personal information. If it's someone's birthday then it'll post a happy birthday message to them.
# Plex Bot
I wrote this before I discovered that Overseerr just has this built-in. My Plex was set up with a webhook to hit whenever new media was downloaded. The bot would post to a specific thread with the metadata about the new media. This included another webserver for serving the cover art from the private Plex metadata server.
# Movie Quiz Bot
Similar to the music bot although I don't think existing apps exist that do this. Essentially it's https://framed.wtf/ except as a game in a Discord channel where random frames are pulled from movies in my media library and everyone competes to name the movie first. This one required some ffmpeg fun to make pulling the stills not take forever. I considered doing static stills or having a cronjob do it, but it's more fun when it's completely random.
I'm 32 and Discord is the harbinger of getting out of touch with technology for me. It is clearly a great service, because so many people use it and seem happy with it, but it is _not_ for me. And I wish that wasn't the case because Discord is pretty much _the_ spot for the communities I'd like to hang around with.
But I wasn't able to get on top of its notification system or get past the gamer heavy UI.
Does your friend group consist of mainly techies? If not, I am impressed you were able to get them to use it. Even more so if they were already on it. I tried to get folks to use Signal with me for a bit and it was the most futile endeavor I've ever attempted.
I managed to get extended family onto Discord. Also have one just for my non-extended family. It works great.
Signal has stuck for a couple of friends, but has decidedly not stuck for anyone else - and the ones it stuck for were either already on it or have a privacy bent.
Signal, back then at least, didn't do group chats, or nowhere near as conveniently as Discord. So much so that I don't even know if Signal does group chats now as I only ever use it for one-on-one.
I set up a Matrix server back then too, didn't take. Discord won.
We really only use discord for voice chat. I also loathe discord for communities and anything else. Funny you mention the notifications - every now and then discord won't send the notification till hours after my bot has sent a message. I think it has something to do with having the discord app on your desktop open and it not knowing how to handle the notification.
I guess my friend group is somewhat techy - but they aren't on HN. We've been on discord since its inception. We moved to Signal as we wanted to get off Meta products.
These all sound like a lot of fun. I've built a few discord bots myself as I've run a few online communities.
1) Reminder bot for scheduled events.
We're all working adults who all played games as teens together . To actually get us together, we schedule our favorite games for once a month to play for a few hours. We all often forget when they start, so my bot posts a 2 week, 1 week 3 days, and 2 hour notice.
2) RCON bot
I run a TF2 server and a Minecraft server. You can manage both via RCON commands via slash commands in Discord. Also the tf2 one monitors player activity and alerts if players are in the server
3. Private server API bot
I founded a private game server for a game that ended service in 2023. The bot reads from our API to make a central list of lobbies and status. It also creates voice channels for each public lobby.
It's also used to help grant items and other admin commands.
4. For April Fools, I made a snarky bot that responded to random messages. It was backed by Gemini.
These have all been fun and novel to make but I've never found a great way to productize them and make money from any of them. Wonder if you've found any avenues there.
The problem is that Discord isn’t e2ee and logs all chats in plaintext for all time, including all DMs. This makes it a nonstarter for me; friends don’t serve as honey in the surveillance trap for communication with their friends.
Nothing that builds up an ever-growing surveillance database on private conversations between friends can be in the running for “best”.
We're all aware of this and we have multiple people working in the defense industry with high clearances in the server. If something needs to be shared that can't be made public then it doesn't go in Discord. This covers about 99.9% of our correspondences.
The cognitive overhead of remembering where I can talk about what with which people seems exhausting. I deleted all chat apps except Signal from my phone.
Signal really should support bots.
> can't be made public then it doesn't go in Discord. This covers about 99.9%
Sometimes I forget that my friend groups are nothing like most peoples’ friend groups.
>The cognitive overhead of remembering where I can talk about what with which people seems exhausting
This is just part of life of having a clearance. If it's not Discord, then it's the happy hour where you have to worry about people getting a few too many beers deep and saying something stupid, and then others have an obligation to report it.
Have some prudence about what to say in what settings is a life skill in general.
I feel the same way. If Signal supported bots/an API and “Communities” (in the WhatsApp sense) I’d finally be able to cutover all my use-cases from Discord. I get that the E2EE is a bit tricky for an API, and that you can kind of hack together Communities by just having a couple group chats, but the UX gap is just a little too big
Not only Discord is not private, it’s looks, feels, and interacts bloated - extremely bloated. Sometimes I am forced to use it and I am almost constantly disgusted in those durations. Luckily around where I live “friend groups” are still far from Discord.
Going from signal to discord is crazy. How can you be OK with knowing that your personal voice chats are being monitored, recorded and sold to the next highest bidder? How can it be so easy to choose convenience over that? Or is it that we have essentially given up and wanna actively take a part in mass surveillance?
Not every decision is about opsec. If, for what you're doing, you want people to be alerted about your actions without your explicit say-so, then signal is not the tool for that job.
Shame on discord for having a lousy privacy stance, but most people aren't on signal for the privacy, most people are on signal because that's where their friends are (and one or two of those friends is there for the privacy).
That's the difference between people who give in and people who don't. This is not about "opsec", it's about exercising your fundamental right to privacy. Majority of people are reckless, the ones who take a second to think about it are not
I agree with you, but the trade off is real for most people. It's unfortunately a binary choice: 'privacy ⊕ social community', instead of 'privacy & social' community.
It's interesting how opensource Zulip[1] hasn't been able to garner as much of a following or usage amongst the gamer crowd compared to Discord.
These two apps are not comparable. My guess is that 90%+ of people using Discord are doing so for the low-latency voice conversations with optional screen/game sharing.
Zulip does not have first-party voice chat. You would be more likely to get gamers to switch to a Teamspeak server.
I think it's important to clarify that it's just audio and video that are E2EE, not text messages themselves. (You may have meant this, but "channels" was a little ambiguous.)
Just create a second group in signal with your friends called "group X: call only". Then everyone mutes the group (which I think mutes calls as well). Then whenever someone wants to join the "voice chat" they can just initiate a call. If someone else sees and joins, so be it.
Mumble is awesome but definitely difficult to properly configure. Especially the TLS certs for any reverse proxy won't work directly, there's a hacky way to make it work which I don't fully trust
I work on a project in this space, and the endless insistence of people that they have to run clearly non-web things through reverse proxies always amazes me :)
Not everything is a web app, and it's trivial these days to obtain certificates, even without a proxy (certbot, etc.).
Of course I understand that if you host a lot of web apps, having all web requests routed through a universal proxy is nice for various reasons. But platforms like Discord and such are complex beasts and use more technologies than HTTP(S).
I love the Idea. And i would adopt the solution if i didn't already have one.
Personally, in my circle of friends, we use slack (at first the free plan and now a payed plan).
During the pandemic we moved to the payed plan, because of the restriction on members in huddles/calls (and also because we want endless history and our own encryption keys).
Currently we have Game (D&D e.g.), PP and Small-talk channels that we use to have huddles that everyone can join.
Mostly we create other channels on demand to organise things. Or share knowledge, music and so on.
One nice feature with slack is, that you can receive notification if a huddle starts in a channel, also on mobile, if you have the app.
I don't know how often we use this notifications to join the small-talk channel. Personally, i join them every other week because i get notified.
PS: If someone from slack reads this, please do a friends plan, something between the free and pro plan :)
Man. Reminds me when many years back I had about 10 friends collaborating on a movie and I needed something between asynchronous and synchronous, so I stripped Wordpress down to just titles and little avatars on a front page feed thing.
About 2 years later Twitter came out and I was like "oh, I guess I was on to something." :)
I didn't see this in the article, but why not just organize the games in a Discord text channel? Discord has very granular notifications that seem the perfect solution here, so folks can see there are unread messages in #games, and the folks gaming are already on the server.
One big noisy chat for everything is an antipattern, as any group of sufficient size eventually learns.
This was going to be my next idea if the bot didn't go well! For unread messages in Discord, you have to actively go into the discord app to check it. The fact that the bot only sends a notification when someone has taken the action to jump into discord signals that you're ready to chat right now. It avoids the 'I'll be on in 30ish', where in reality that might not happen. Talk is cheap.
The discord of '22 was, iirc, very different from now, or at least the culture around it. It looks like they just only used it for a single voice chat lobby
The Discord of 2020 and before absolutely supported text channels, voice channels, multiple of the above, customizable notifications, and everything required here. Like OP and many others I found myself on a number of Discord servers during the pandemic for voice/video chat, gaming together, etc. and that app was the straightforward solution both for organizing and the actual event for groups of any size from 4-20.
The piece was published this week, and yall seem to be missing the point. The goal is to let people know when a VC is happening amongst this group, not to do party matching for whatever game is being played.
"Scheduling" can become a four-letter word when it comes to adults organizing for game nights. In many groups game night rarely seems to rise to the formality of scheduling sports with organized practice/play sessions.
It's nice to hear that this group found a way to maintain the spontaneity.
TIL about "four-letter word" as an ESL speaker. If anyone else is confused about the linguistic compression algorithm that squeezes "scheduling" into just four letters, the magic is, of course, profanity! And "four-letter word" seems to be a polite way of saying something is or can become a PITA.
yeah calling something a "four-letter word" is intended to evoke the idea that, people react negatively upon merely hearing the word (as though it were an expletive)
I completely disagree. The point is the impact it has on lives, not the tools used to build it. I would enjoy it if more people focused their writing on the impact their work has on people, and less on the tools and processes used. Or at the very least, clearly delineate the build from the impact.
I see where you're coming from, but I like the way the story is formatted.
There's plenty to doom and gloom about with the state of tech right now, but this is a good reminder that sometimes even Big Internet tools, with a little ingenuity, can sometimes be repurposed to serve the users and not some corporation's bottom line.
It's kind of a throwback to the olden days where you might stand up an IRC server or something similar just for your friend group. I like seeing people returning to the small internet where it serves as a substrate for real people doing real things.
It sounds like we agree. I wasn't dissing the article - I was saying that I like this article's writing and want to see more of it, and that I appreciated the title not being about the tech stack.
This was a fun read. Being experienced in various methods of self hosting, it was cool to learn of coolify. Seeing more people get into self hosting always makes me happy.
I really like this idea, especially the music quiz and birthday reminder. I've been wanting to build a bot for my friend group that shows up now and then when things go quiet, just to gently remind us of something warm. It doesn’t interrupt anyone, but quietly adds a bit of connection to the group.
Wow so cool, I feel like if I had a light near by desk that turned on every time a friend was on discord voice, I'd be so much more likely to hop in for a few minutes over getting an notification. Something about the physical affordance feels harder to ignore
Check out Philips Hue or Govee lights with IFTTT integration - they can already do exactly this with Discord webhooks, no need to build it from scratch.
If folks don't want to understandably install the discord app perhaps notifications could be sent through something like ntfy. Like create a dedicated channel for notifications for this and have the interested people subscribe to it. Can't say for sure if the discord.py library will allow for something like this but I think it should be possible.
Please, fix the contrast of the clicked links and your background. The discord.py link is unreadable. Same with supabase and coolify. Those I'm sure I haven't visited.
This comment is so interesting because clearly, it's the unvisited color that's broken, you know this, and you even typed it out, but it is so common for visited links to be darker than unvisited links that it makes you assume the opposite.
Reminds me of our Teamspeak Server, that we have already running for over 2 decades. Not only for playing games but more for just come online and hang out, quietly sitting next to each other, "lurking". We do this almost every evening, someone is always there. Probably couldn't live without it T.T.
I always try to solve problems by using what people already have, so I wonder if having another group on Signal, where only “I'm playing!” messages would be allowed, couldn't fix the issue…?
I think it was the fact that actions spoke louder than words for us. It’s easy to say “I’ll jump on” but then you get distracted and then 30 mins later you go online. Similarly to when people say “leaving now” and then they start getting ready to leave. Because we are notified that someone has taken the action of going online they are 100% available to chat or play a game.
Do discord events allow for connections to ifttt or zapier? Or even just trigger a webhook? If so then you can trigger a smart light bulb in each persons home via these services. To get this to work you create 2 applets triggered by the same webhook. One to turn the light on, then another to turn it off after a specified delay.
I’ve always thought this way and it’s amazing what applications and problems you can solve or replace with text files (csv, TXT, md), calendars (shared) and email. If I had to estimate, 80-90%?
I always believed in the power of simple tools and don’t reinvent the wheel.
My friend group has multiple Signal chats for different purposes. One is a general chat, no politics allowed. Then there's a chat that is for politics. One is for live music, and there are other sub-groups for specific interests.
Fun story. This reminds me of the summer my friends and I were all still around our small town — we used the Yo! app the same way, as a bat signal to meet up and get into nonsense. Someone would start Yo!ing and then once there was a critical mass of return Yo!s we'd switch to text/phone and link up.
I have several chat groups with friends and even with my wife to avoid this topic. With my wife, I have several now: one to share recipes, one to share the weeks meal plan, one to talk about the activities of our two year old and one to share houses we might be interested in buying.
It’s great to separate for record keeping, but mostly to avoid forcing the conversation on some organisational thing when the other just needs eg to vent about something at work
The only time I've seen this feature be used is when my grandma accidentally turns it on in the family groupchat - I just don't wanna hang out with my friends in WhatsApp
> Over the next year, our group chat (in Signal) was drowning in notifications. A mix of general chit chat, talks on the ever changing news of COVID and the most important - when can people play games and chat. It really annoyed me when people would post on "hey anyone wanna play [game] in 15 mins?", for it to be buried in another 5 messages.
My friend group's solution to this problem is...lots of different group chats. They're all on Google Chat, but we have tons of different ones for different topics: bikes, space, covid/infectious diseases, baking, craft, plants, wildlife, true crime, politics, depressing news, renewables/sustainability, tech geekery, board games, home improvement...
I do miss video chat nights during lockdown though.
This reminds me a lot of the days when we would just hang in ventrillo and teamspeak to just hang out even when not playing games. Especially around the time when communities gathered around dedicated servers were still a thing. Miss those days :(
> it was a life savior when my little one was a newborn to jump onto Discord for even 5 minutes to chat with my friends, watch someone play a game and then log off for another diaper change
I'm afraid I can't relate to this at all. I may a bit older and/or I may have less close friends but I prefer a very different kind of social contact that is more like make plans, meet up, rinse and repeat.
Back in the AIM/ORC days I loathed being pinged all the time for chit chat - this system reminds me of that!
My friend group just uses a separate group chat where the purpose is just to say "Hey I'm hopping onto discord if anyone wants to hang out" and it works well enough.
I had the idea of making a website where anyone of a group of friends can post their evening plans - go to trivia, play tennis, etc - and others would be able to sign up to join.
Never made it but glad to see these things can work.
use a kanban board. FOSS options exist for web-hosted implementations. Kanban works because It supports a 'backlog' of events to do, timelines for things to do that are on a deadline (e.g. concerts) and allows people to add activities / plans to backlogs which get moved to 'ready to do' as things are done / cleared. Keeps everything organised and simple, with good over-sight on what's going on when. Downside is it requires friends already somewhat technical or at least willing to learn.
This was the original purpose of Twitter-- it was advertised as a network where anyone could post what they're doing and notify their friends immediately. Even until recently tweets could be received via SMS (not sure about the current status of that feature) so you'd see in real time what they're up to.
Of course, Twitter/X/etc are a far cry from that now-- but it could be worth trying where you and your friends use the service like that.
I do think this is an interesting idea. Lemme see if I can do this. How do you think the UI/UX should look like.
Here's what I am thinking.
You sign in
It asks you what you want to do
And at what time (hour) in another column and (date) in another column
And then it asks you the location
And then we can have a contact-me: which could lead to discord or signal. Or, if you aren't comfortable sharing that info, then you could have a shareable link that you can share with anyone and then they can write their email or whatever and you would get live notifications through mail or whatever platform you decided.
Lemme know if we are on the same page?
EDIT: I have created a mvp but like, the problem is that it's just a form y'know and I just created something where you would input in this information and it would give html and then you can host it and using https://formsubmit.co/ you can use it. Though I guess one of the issues is that you have to validate each form in formsubmit (not good for ephemeral forms) and I guess it also shows email but there's a way to hide it too.
Also, I guess the problems aren't of forms but of discoverability. How do you make people discover your forms but I guess one way could be of having a list of all your forms or just the current ones that you want to show (IDK?) on github pages for example and then you could just share the github pages link to anyone or just have it in a about me section of most messengers?
Also.. Maybe then if you wanted to rather share it to anybody you could create a additional place where anybody can share their forms/such website. But I am not sure if what I've all said is the best user experience.
I’m confused about what this solution does. I’d expect that as people move to discord all the message spam that was happening in signal would just eventually move over to discord as people got used to communicating there instead of signal
You don't get hundreds of messages per day by writing in email style. You get there if you have a lot of synchronous or near-synchronous communication in chat. It's kind of obvious that voice call suits this better, but there is friction involved in making an actual call.
Discord voice channel might reduce the friction if you make this culture of hopping in and out of it.
This is great. For years I’ve been wanting to solve the “link problem” in my Signal group. My friends post a ton of great links that get lost in the scrollback and I’d love a way to get just a dedicated queue. I’ve thought about things like a private subreddit or even just a different link group; but everything just felt like moving the problem and change management. Great to see this type of solution worked for you!
I think Signal should just create a pin option like how discord and a lot of others have.
But in the meantime if I had to genuinely suggest a method without any friction if you are okay with using code like the author did, then I'd suggest something and lemme know what you think
Why don't you just create a special emoji that would only be used for the purposes of Pin, like (Oh the irony), and then have a signal cli or signal-bot https://github.com/signal-bot/signal-bot where you could do something like /pins and it would show the pins but you would need a different mobile number or account for that and honestly just a big hassle. I could think of other ways but we would never reach the native User experience that signal could provide if it would allow pin natively
EDIT: Even a more simpler way could be if we could just search the chat emojis and we could just search <the pin emoji> and it would show it
There is a very weird display bug on this site : when I access it in lanscape horizontal position, with my iPhone 8 on Brave or Safari : all the text is trembling, unable to settle on a size. Trapped in a resizing loop. If I rotate the phone verically it settles properly and then also horizontally. But if I reload the page (horizontally) it goes nuts again :)
i built the same thing (though only the notifier, not all the stat tracking) for my friend group back in 2017 when PUBG came out and we were trying to play together as often as we could. can confirm it worked great.
i eventually moved the bot to glitch.com (rip) where we could collaborate on it and it evolved into a monster of in jokes and utilities. it's going offline this week unless i can find the time to migrate it off glitch
I have a similar friend group that hangs out on discord now due to the post college diaspora and we even use a Signal group chat. However, it sounds like it's a smaller group, because we've taken to literally sending bat signal gifs into the chat when someone gets online and it works well enough for us :)
Discord was originally a place to organize for playing videogames with people. If you're using it for that purpose, you're probably on your computer already (because that's where the games are). Thus, the mobile app ends up being more for checking in with your community while away from the computer, rather than a primary driver of your engagement with the platform.
They could have been using it in browser. One of discords underrated decisions is that the browser version is fully featured and doesn't force you to download the app, a new user can join a server in their browser with just a name which is as low friction as you can get.
This is really interesting as a way to keep people connected on a regular basis. I wonder if something similar could be done for groups who aren't necessarily into gaming: like say a "virtual fireplace" where folks could just pop into a call and talk
Discord is already like that for a lot of niche communities and fandoms that aren't necessarily gaming; it just all evolved on a gaming-focused platform.
Reminds me of those old coworking circles I used to be part of. Not about being productive really, but more about giving people a reason to show up and talk. Friction gets replaced with rhythm.
I tried that a long time ago with teamspeak, and then discord, but my friends are not big users of these tools and so it didnt work. Discords do too much. If whatsapp could do this it could work
I do think that whatsapp could do this tbh if it would actually provide its api like discord does.
Telegram feels like it can definitely do such stuff and I found in my opinion that its way easier to host telegram bot on cloudflare than it is on discord so theoretically you could even have it as a cf worker with a deploy on cf button so as to even people who don't know too much about deploying could use it.
This reminds me of the Houseparty app that took off with my friend group during Covid. It had a mechanism to notify others when someone had joined a party. Fun times
We just use a slack. The overwhelming single channel? nope. channels for all the hobbies, shitposting, news, games, etc. We even have a discord notification for gaming channel when people get on the gaming channel. Separate notification for the chat channel if someone wants to just chill.
God I'm so jealous you were able to get your friends to join Discord.
My in-person friend group revolved around the bar we all went to. When the bar shut down, I floated the idea of a group chat but couldn't get anyone interested. No one wants to install another app and get notified more. In olden days, we'd just solve the problem with Facebook, but no one uses that anymore either. My friends are ordinary, normal, overworked people who need an easy option. The bar was that. Show up when you want to connect. Easy.
So now there's nothing. I basically just lost all my friends. We all have each other's numbers but that's just not an option for coordination.
Fuck you, Mark Zuckerberg, for making Facebook so shitty it's not even useful anymore for the one thing I ever found it useful for. I hope when we finally start coming for the billionaires, we come for you first.
Sorry to hear that. FWIW it feels like there was probably a mismatch in valuation of the friendship there.
For my case I was able to convince many friends to connect on various chat platforms of their choice. Some friendships fizzled out, others are still going. And then there are some anew.
Unfortunately a lot of our friendships are essentially default proximity relationships. These tend to not survive as soon as the first obstacle to proximity shows up if not enough people are willing to put in the effort to make it something more.
This is why it’s so hard to make local friends as an adult in a new city. Good inspiration for me to make something similar to keep in touch with real people!
Now I feel old, back in my days we all hung out on IRC and we broadcast a wav file to call on friends to join game, and had crazy scripts and bots that did weekly summary, best engagement line and so on and so forth
I need the opposite of this. Some of my friends just want to sit in Discord and play the same three games all day every day. I either need a way to get them to do something different or to find new friends
Interesting. But in my experience, the Australian need for daily social interaction with a group of peers - preferably including some sort of large alcoholic beverage - is quite a bit above average. Not sure how a group of Americans would respond.
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.”
Also from the guidelines, HN is not primarily for (self) promo. This isn’t a Show HN, though, so it’s not necessary for us to have something we can hold and play with. Look with your eyes and enjoy OP’s thing vicariously.
In the vibe code era, is it gauche to ask for code?
Considering that OP hasn’t made any other posts or comments in any other threads, it’s fair to assume that they are like 90% of users who don’t post or comment, but they did in this thread about their stuff, so it is sort of a legitimate criticism.
I didn’t claim it violated them either. I just thought having a curious story was a good enough value for this post to exist. I don’t think it needs code or a product.. in fact .. I wish more people did this kind of posts.. and just encourage people to do stuff for the sake of it .. be it a notification system for your friends … or just a story about friendship.
And .. there is actually code for the bot inside the story.
Serious advice, some people don't work so well with heat and get angry fast (there is a heat wave in europe right now). Drink a lot and splash your head with water helps ..
I don't get it. What in the post did you find so novel that you want a full solution based on that? It's just a notification service which you can whip up in half an hour with any messaging service. It would probably take 10 minutes to do it using telegram. 30 if you need to create a brand new bot.
Perhaps read it, use one of the many discord wrapper apis, and replicate it. He just hooks into one of the many events discord emits and bot sends a message.
Even one of the LLMs can very easily vibe code this…
For small projects I tend to use write because that's what it feels like. For bigger things where there is a design element, I'll usually say designed and wrote X instead if I want emphasize its non-triviality.
I didn't think of it before but you're right building feels like implying more weight than it feels right. But also I concede this is quite subjective.
