It'd be cool to see more people (or communities) try and make their own little hangouts online. Websockets make it really simple to have a basic chat app because they simplify everything down to the point where you can send and receive strings, and the client can just be a webpage.
Though I admit most people probably want features like a history, uploading images, or good handling for unreliable internet connections, and those aren't exactly trivial. I specifically wanted something where presence is meaningful and where everyone isn't just expected to be reachable all the time, myself.
I think minimum would be like, 10 lines of history (or the past 10 minutes?), just to get a bit of context. Wouldn't call it a necessity but it helps for folks with bad connection (or if a system ends up crashing / power outage)
@VAdaPEGA Yeah I guess making things work ok for phone connections isn't too bad, you just have to have it in mind as you design things (which IRC did not)
@zlago It's a protocol you can build other protocols on top of, and it handles things like compression and handling individual messages with a start and end.
Web browsers allow JavaScript to use it, and there's safeguards to make it so that you can't use that functionality to go make someone's browser send someone arbitrary traffic in an arbitrary protocol. You still need a server but the server code is a lot simpler than it would normally be.
@frost True, you don't necessarily have to do it Discord-style where you can scroll back through years of logs. In fact, being unable to do that can be a plus.
@NovaSquirrel Yeah, our streaming site logs history in a file forever, but never reads that file, and tosses in-memory history when it restarts!
It used to send you the entire in-memory history on connect, but we recently changed it to only send you the past 4 hours. (4 hours is long enough to probably be longer than any given stream, but short enough that you don't have to worry about people coming by the next day and reading the kinda private conversation you had in the stream chat.)
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