u/Time_Party_2615

Hi everyone (again!)

You have probably seen some of my posts regarding venta.gg - but thats not the point of this post.

Posting here is like playing with fire. Depending on what side of the globe is currently lit up, you get people being nice and give honest feedback or seem genuinely interested in what you're doing OR you get some people who for whatever reason try to slander your project. Or maybe its just the ongoing heat getting the best of them, I don't know.

My posts have seen both sides of this, and it's a bit draining at least.

Not to say that criticism is bad, I appreciate it - for example that's what caused me to shift gears and make sure we'll open source everything (yes I know the client is not, but it's getting there) and support full self hosting with federation.

It's hard work to create a viable alternative. And having more devs spend their time on it makes sure that you - as a consumer - have the power of choosing what you want to use for whatever reason is most important to you.

So from my side: I wish all the guys who work on something new all the best, like the guys from r/OsmiumChat, Nexoria and Fluxxer. And all the others that I have missed!

Spread support and not hate. We're all fighting for the same goal of a more open internet.

Hello everyone,

I've been now building venta.gg for a short while and as I get closer to supporting self hosting (should already work with the current client) and federation, I'm looking for a around 5-10 people who can spin up a server on their own domain and put the implementation through its paces.

Requirements:

• Have a domain and a lonely vps
• No fear of tuning env variables which may or may not be documented :-) But a dev will be able to assist! :-)

If anyone would like to join, please comment here or DM me.

Have a good week!

EDIT: Its open source software and you can inspect the code here https://github.com/AlpineBits-ch/AlpineBackend

Hi y'all,

My third post here this week, I honestly did not expect to write that many posts in such a short time 😃

Since my initial post and our feedback form got quite a bit of traction I'm following up with a very early open beta test for venta.

I have written a big post about who we are and what we're doing over here https://venta.gg/#/blog/initial-release-and-a-bit-of-story-time I also mentioned some known issues that I didn't quite get around to fix just yet, but I eventually will in the near time.

I'm also committed to have a fully transparent road map over here https://venta.gg/#/roadmap - things like self hosting and federation are my top priority after fixing all the bugs that are currently open.

The download is currently a windows "native" app (tauri / angular). The web only application currently is not a huge priority for me, as I want to get the native look and feel right. This will be tackled after the self hosting and federation.

I know, installing an exe from a randos pc isn't a wise choice. To make your choice a bit easier, I have created a full impressum here, so if I was to send you malware you have my legal name, company and address to sue me. You can verify that this is me by looking at the official swiss UID index over here. 😄

Last but not least, I know that trying to build a community on venta initially is quite hard when everyone is still chilling on discord, so my friend has setup a discord community if you want to chat or have issues or suggestions. Currently we're quite alone in it, so feel free to join.

Okay, really last but not least: Our WebRTC infra goes via Cloudflares SFU. We have a hard cap currently at 1TB ingress and egress. If that would be hit, all voice calls and private calls would stop working. Just keep that in mind, I'd post a discord announcements if we'd hit that.

If you hit issues with sign up, its probably the spam blocker. Let me know if its too aggressive and I turn it down a bit.

EDIT: I'll fully open source this on github tomorrow. Maybe the client a bit later, but the backend should be live by tomorrow or the day after at https://github.com/AlpineBits-ch

Hi y'all,

Since my last post resulted in quite a lot of activity and a lot of DMs I'd like to organize this a bit more.

I have created a feedback / waitlist page where you can share your thoughts anonymously and optionally join our waitlist.

https://tally.so/r/Gxq9GQ

Here is the feature set of the current implementation

• Guilds (Categories, Channels, Advanced Permission system)
• Private Calls
• Noise cancellation, autogain via rust (configurable)
• Wiki Pages for Guilds
• Voice / Screenshare / Cam streaming (Cloudflare SFU servers, not Live Kit)
• Initial E2EE with MLS in DM's (basic implementation, lacks things as joining new devices etc, will be completed in the full release)
• Full cross platform support (iOS, Android, Linux (deb, rpm) and Windows)
• Friends
• Ringtone, Message (..) sound customization
• Appearance customization, probably a bad thing 😃

What's currently missing / bugged:

• Profile Mutations
• Privacy settings (Who can add you as friends, who can send you DM's, etc)
• Full translations (current impl. can be found here)
• Some settings and actions are currently missing here and there, slowly coming together
• The whole UI currently still looks a lot like discord, this is something we want to change but no idea beats that discord style UI as of now
• Public discovery of servers, since we want to get this right and not accidentally promote some randos server to our current 5 users.
• Product Name. We have around 4 internal names for it but nothing yet decided.
• Obv. a whole bunch of annoying bugs, we will get there soon.

Best,

Dominic

Hi y'all,

We are a team of two devs (both around 10 years of experience) who somehow stumbled into creating an alternative for discord.

Why: We are actually building a big MMO game and for this we had to build a voice engine. This POC has quickly turned into our everyday communication "hub" and we're now expanding it to support many use cases discord supports, merely because we're sick and tired of the way discord handles our data.

What we can already do: We support guilds, channels and text based messages. Thats the easy part 😄.

Additionally were supporting real time voice communications via WebRTC and cloudflare's SFU edge network. Quite cool tech tbh! The whole client runs on top of tauri (cross plattform js framework) where we can build the client in angular (don't judge me, I'm influenced heavily by enterprise software) and have a small part of the code running in rust. That includes mainly the stream sourcing code (like voice, screen share, webcam, you name it). The whole guild (will) come with a whole bunch of mod tools to make everyones live easier. Currently we have a basic permission system implemented, but we'll expand on this functionality.

Our plan for it: Tbh, currently we're primarely looking if this is something someone wants and thats the whole reason i'm posting here. My dream goal would be, to get this out and make a bit of money on that to cross fund our game development.

For the opensource and self host fans: Once we have a stable code base and a stable client with most of the functionality implemented, we're happily moving this to be source available and thus self hostable. No decision yet on going full on open source with it, but we can consider it. Altough I have to admit that self hosting will be a technical challenge at least in the beginning, there are around 5 microservices running with redis, postgres, scylla and rabbitmq.

Anyway, feedback welcome!

PS: As the question will come up, yes we have used AI. Altough to clarify, the only "vibe coded" part of the product is the ui layer of the client. We're both backend devs, and admittely the AI ui looks better than what I could have ever crafted. 😃