Hacker NewsEarde is a Discord alternative built specifically for open source projects. A maintainer connects a public GitHub repository and gets a verified community for it, with live text chat and a structured public forum indexed on the open web. Doing a soft launch today, mostly because we want to understand more about the problem we’re trying to solve.
I have spent some years around programming language and devtool communities, and something always seemed strange to me, because open source projects depend on each other but the communities around them are treated as completely separate by platforms like Discord.
A user asks a question in one project's Discord or forum, even though the actual problem may come from one of its dependencies, so they have to rewrite the question and start another discussion somewhere else. Sometimes the question simply remains in the wrong place.
GitHub represents the relationships between codebases, but the communities surrounding those codebases have no equivalent network. Earde is an attempt to build it, so here maintainers can connect their community with related ones while keeping separate their members, moderators, sections, etc.
Once two communities are connected, a member can route an existing thread to other communities or create a shared thread from the beginning. Moderators in the destination community review the request and decide whether to accept it and where it should appear in their forum. Then the same discussion appears in both communities and people arriving from either side participate in the same conversation.
For example, a bug report might begin in the community for an application and later be routed to the community maintaining the networking library that caused it. The library maintainers can accept the existing discussion into their own Bug reports section without asking the user to recreate it.
Each community also has live text chat and a public forum, and selected chat messages can be promoted into a permanent thread while keeping their authors and a link to the original conversation. Discourse already has a similar functionality, so we don't consider that a moat.
The product is public and you can explore it without creating an account. Posting, commenting and using live chat require signup. We created three fictional project communities (Northstar, Rivet, Drift) so that you can check the cross community features immediately.
A Northstar bug report routed to Rivet:
https://earde.com/c/northstar/t/116-client-enters-a-reconnec... https://earde.com/c/rivet/t/116-client-enters-a-reconnect-lo...
One canonical discussion shared between Rivet and Drift, with each community placing it in a different forum section:
https://earde.com/c/rivet/t/117-backpressure-contract-for-sl... https://earde.com/c/drift/t/117-backpressure-contract-for-sl...
A Northstar chat conversation promoted into a permanent public thread:
https://earde.com/c/northstar/t/118-preserving-unsent-editor...
Earde is mostly SSR written in OCaml using Dream and PostgreSQL, with minimal client side JavaScript. Realtime fanout is handled by a small service written in Gleam.
Earde is currently closed source, but we plan to open source it as soon as we've cleaned up the codebase enough for other people to reasonably work with it.
This is a very early beta, connections between communities are manual right now, but we eventually want to analyze repository dependency graphs and use them to suggest relevant connections.
If you participate in or maintain an open-source community, does the shared thread model make sense after trying the examples above?
We're really happy we get to show this to you all, thank you for reading about it! Please let us know your thoughts and questions in the comments.
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