Online Chat

I have grown increasingly frustrated with Discord. Recently, a third party they used to store customer support data had a cyber security breach. This failure to protect their information, along with the constant ramping up of efforts to encourage users to buy subscriptions, proves that Discord is no longer a platform meant for its users. They could care less about whether or not the users are satisfied or safe on their platform; they have become too big to fail. Once, Discord was the haven online gamers, but now that it's in the mainstream, it has become as bad as any other social media platform.

There really aren't any other applications that serve the same purpose as Discord. There is Slack, but that's like Discord's annoying little brother that no one talks to. Discord and Slack are both centralized services. When people use them, they are publishing information to the company's servers. These companies say that they do not access users' information, but what happens on these platforms is owned by the company. If they wanted to (or were forced to by the government), they could access any user's chat history, because it exists on their servers.

I think the future of chat apps lies in self-hosting. Users should be able to control their own data directly. No longer will people take advantage of a service controlled by a company; it will be on decentralized networks maintained by individuals. This is the core principle of a company called Matrix. They've invented a way for people to host their own chat servers, with the possibility of using a variety of different front-end clients. Personally, I don't think this technology is talked about enough.

The best way to keep your information private is to make it your own. When you send information to another service, it no longer becomes yours, no matter how many terms of service documents promise otherwise. Keeping a chat application within your own network ensures that you own it. That's what a Matrix home server does. There are a handful of public servers that can be accessed within a Matrix client, but those are mostly used for meta-discussions about Matrix itself.

This is one of the disadvantages. It can be difficult to find communities within the Matrix network, as they are all decentralized. Discord excels in that regard, in that communities are searchable and prevalent across the Internet. Almost every online community advertises a link to join their Discord server. If Matrix were more popular, it would be just as easy to advertise the community's Matrix URL.

There's another disadvantage of Matrix: it can be more difficult to set up. It requires much more effort in order to understand what it takes to start a Matrix server. Discord, on the other hand, allows users to start a new "server" in a few clicks. A Matrix server requires a host device, a URL and the proper security features in place in order to be ready for use.

Further, the way chat messaging works in Matrix is that users can make groups. These groups can have multiple members, but it is just one chat. Users can create threads, but it's not like DIscord where "servers" can be split into multiple different channels. Matrix chats are just one long transcript. Matrix also does not use WebRTC for voice communication, instead opting for VoIP. I dislike this choice because WebRTC is a peer-to-peer technology. It would be perfect for Matrix since it can be self-hosted. VoIP is an antiquated form of throwing voice data across the Internet to other hosts. Matrix somehow manages to be everything I would want out of a modern chat application, yet fails to execute its most important features at the same time.

There is a big hole in the chat application market right now, in my opinion. An application that takes the ease of use Discord and combines it with the decentralized nature of Matrix is something that is really needed.

It should be easy to keep your own personal information, while being able to just chat with other people online. It is something that is essential to the Internet, something that should be a given. Companies seem hell-bent on trying to milk users out of everything they own.

That's why I'm developing an application called Bonfire. I want to create a chat application that is made for the individual. It will be self-hostable and use WebRTC for voice communication. I completed the first iteration of it as a project for college. In order to move on to the second iteration, I need to learn Rust and refine my knowledge of web development. In other words, it's going to take time before I have an actual app that functions properly. This first iteration is a little scuffed, to say the least.

I'm not making any promises that I will produce a finished Bonfire any time soon, but I do feel incredibly passionate about our freedom to communicate with one another on the Internet. I believe that the future is decentralized. Companies and governments are overreaching, and it's up to us, as individuals, to find ways to avoid that. Bonfire is going to be my contribution to that effort.