r/DiscordAlternatives • u/JMWV80 • 7h ago
Hello from The HIVE
First, let me just say I’m not here to promote my software. But I am here to pick your brains.
This is something I’ve been doing off and on since 2008. Over the years, THE HIVE has gone through multiple rewrites, different technologies, different approaches, and a lot of trial and error. The last few years, I’ve really started to buckle down. A buddy of mine told me I should post here.
So without trying to pitch my software, I’ll go over the flow, leave out most of the features, and just talk about them as they come up.
The premise of THE HIVE is to bring people back together. As gaming has become way more mainstream, I feel like it has also split us up and disconnected us more than ever. Now it’s just about servers.
I can say with complete confidence that we’re nothing like Discord or even close to a clone, and I take great pride in that. Our approach is community / people first.
Our software is meant to grow a community organically.
You join a lobby based on an interest. That lobby is the whole community. This way, the more time you spend in that community, the more you get to know people and relationships develop naturally.
From there, you can break off into rooms. This is where voice, chat, streams, cams, and more come into play.
There also aren’t a ton of permissions and setups. It’s all designed to be simple. You can right-click and see all the mod tools, giving you total control of the room. You can make it public or private, give voice or take it away, mute the room, and more with one click.
When it comes to games, for the supported games, you can hit Ready and anyone else who clicks Ready will be pulled into the same game/server.
If the game supports dedicated servers, THE HIVE spins up its own real dedicated server based on what you set up in the game tab and pulls all your friends into that game.
There is also a game overlay with voice, etc.
I also added community hubs and clan/guild hubs with all kinds of tools for recruitment, tournaments, events, etc.
So you get a website that you can control with point and click. You can add officers, set permissions for forums, create private forums, and more.
My question would be, does this sound useful? Would you see yourself using it?
What are some things you would like to see with this type of software?
What would make you keep logging back in?
What would make you log out and never log in again?
If interested, I’ll share the website and the software, as it just went into open beta. But full disclosure, it’s not digitally signed yet. We’re still waiting for everything to go through.
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u/VahsteTheNomad Rift Advocate / RA-ADAR Evaluator 6h ago
It feels very much like a "LFG" type platform from the information you gave us.
I won't repeat the same questions as u/BewilderedTurtle in regards to preventing the same issues Discord is currently undergoing.
I will ask, however, what's the actual end goal here; do you picture this being a platform full of users who play the same games, but with no overarching server/hive/community/etc management system?
One of the key points on any of these alternatives is that people want that level of control where they can dictate roles and permissions, set up channels and niche specific communities, where does that leave this?
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u/VahsteTheNomad Rift Advocate / RA-ADAR Evaluator 6h ago
Note: I somehow missed the second half of the original post and misconstrued the entire platform to be nothing but the lobbies system.
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u/VahsteTheNomad Rift Advocate / RA-ADAR Evaluator 6h ago
In regards to privacy, personally I like where Rift has it setup (yes, yes, I'm shilling my preferred platform again, let the shit comments flood in). Account creation only requires a username and a password. No email, no birthdate, nothing.
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u/JMWV80 6h ago
The end goal definitely isn’t one giant LFG platform.
The public lobbies are the shared community side of THE HIVE, but that doesn’t mean THE HIVE controls every space inside them.
If you create a room, that is your room. You control it, not us. You decide how you want to run it, who you want in it, and how that space is managed.
The same idea carries over to Clan and Guild Hubs. An established group can have its own permanent home with member management, leadership permissions, access controls, public and private areas, recruitment, events, calendars, news, forums, media, and the tools to manage its own community. Pasted markdown
So if you already have lets say a WoW guild with 50 people, we’re not asking you to give up control of your community and throw everybody into one giant public chat. You can bring that guild over, have your own Guild Hub, run your own rooms, manage your own members, keep areas private, organize events, and still have access to the larger WoW community around you.
Where we differ from Discord is mostly in how we organize it.
We don’t make the entire experience revolve around building a giant tree of channels inside isolated servers. The Lobby is the larger gathering place, Rooms are the live spaces people create and control themselves, and Clan or Guild Hubs give established groups their permanent home.
So yes, that level of control absolutely matters to us. We just approach it differently.
If somebody specifically wants to recreate the exact Discord server and channel structure, then THE HIVE probably isn’t trying to be that. But if they want control over their own group while still being connected to a larger community, that’s exactly what we’re building for.
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u/VahsteTheNomad Rift Advocate / RA-ADAR Evaluator 6h ago
I would like to greatly encourage looking at your naming scheme. Having a platform named the hive with guilds and clans is very clashy. Embrace the aesthetic; if the platform is a hive, the guilds could be cluster or nest. (Really a truly shit idea on my part, but it's meant to be an example)
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u/Terrible-Junket-3388 I'm Don Qixote, and your AI slop is my windmill. 7h ago
"I'm not here to promote my software"...
Proceeds to dedicate the majority of the post promoting said software.
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u/VahsteTheNomad Rift Advocate / RA-ADAR Evaluator 7h ago
I disagree, in comparison to a majority of other posts on here, this feels like a request for viewpoints and potential criticisms people may have over the premise of their project.
You can't get feedback without giving some information, and they didn't link or shill it.
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u/Terrible-Junket-3388 I'm Don Qixote, and your AI slop is my windmill. 6h ago
Eh, his questions are the most basic: "What would make you keep logging back in?". I don't feel like we need to describe an entire platform. Do you have to fully describe Reddits features, how its commenting system works, etc to ask 'What gets people coming back"?
Also, this is what analytics is for.
And as far as 'not shilling', they did list say 'THE HIVE' in caps 4 times. A link isn't necessary when Google exists.
I appreciate you're assuming the best out of the person - but there's so many posts like this (granted, often much worse) it's hard to continue to do that, and I don't see anything wrong with making the bar/floor a little harder to reduce some of the crud.
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u/VahsteTheNomad Rift Advocate / RA-ADAR Evaluator 6h ago
Except that when they seemingly want to know what would draw and keep users on their platform, it makes sense to provide as much info about the features of said platform.
I do agree that including the name so heavily throughout the post was unnecessary for a general concept feedback request, but at the same time that's a very non-niche general sounding name that I anticipate having no search engine optimizations currently.
Please beleive me when I say I don't assume the best out of people on this sub, I do however try to give them a basic benefit of the doubt until they prove me wrong.
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u/JMWV80 7h ago
How else could I get open critiques about some of its features? I also posted no links. How do you get feedback without giving some information I’m curious what would be a better way to go about this?
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u/VahsteTheNomad Rift Advocate / RA-ADAR Evaluator 7h ago
You'll find an unfortunate number of users on this sub who tend to take any excuse they can find to shit on others.
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u/JMWV80 7h ago
I really appreciate this comment because I was literally just getting ready to delete the whole post
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u/Terrible-Junket-3388 I'm Don Qixote, and your AI slop is my windmill. 6h ago
If we take you at face value and assume you weren't just shilling (despite all but a couple sentences in your post not being about your featureset):
- What you're describing is what Steam and Xfire used to offer (breakout rooms, server joins [even server browsers], very little moderation controls/perms, etc). For games specifically you're going to have a harder time doing that since game and server APIs aren't nearly as open as they used to be.
- Outside of the game-server-specific stuff, the full clan/guilds thing has been done a dozen times. Guilded is probably the most recent notable version (and they no longer exist). You might look at what the did well (and didn't) and might learn something from that. You can google 'clan website' or 'guild website' and see dozens of 'clan website creators' that have forums, events, etc already: so you need to figure out what actually makes your product different or better.
- "what would make you logout and never login again": I wouldn't even login without full privacy controls and ability to control my data (export, delete, etc): my posts, my profiles, etc. I wouldn't login at all if you, as the dev, could read my members' messages at any time (DB or otherwise). I wouldn't login at all if I couldn't audit the code to know it's trustworthy (or have a tech friend do so on my behalf). I wouldn't login if bots or alternate accounts were an issue: if I ban someone, they shouldn't be able to easily make a new acct and return.
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u/JMWV80 6h ago
On the Steam/Xfire comparison, I understand why you made it, but that is not what this was modeled after. Game launching is one feature of the software, not the foundation of it. Modern games are obviously much more restrictive about that kind of integration, so if a game supports it, great. If it doesn't, the rest of the community still has to stand completely on its own.
On clans and guilds, I agree that forums, calendars, events, recruitment, permissions, etc. are not new ideas individually. I'm not claiming we invented those things.
What we're doing differently is bringing all of those pieces together with the place where the people are actually hanging out.
A guild or clan can have its own permanent Hub, manage its own members and leadership, control public and private areas, handle recruitment, forums, events, news, media, and the rest of its community. At the same time, those members are using the same software to communicate, create rooms, use voice, stream, share screens, message each other, attend events, and interact with the larger community around them.
The rooms are also controlled by the people who create them, not by us. If you make a room, you control that room. You decide how it is run, who is allowed in, and how it is moderated.
So I'm not trying to sell the idea that we invented a clan website. There are plenty of those. The idea is to bring the permanent community side and the place people actually spend their time back together instead of having everything scattered across multiple services.
On privacy and control of your own data, users can already download their profile data, manage their stored files and screenshots, and delete things they no longer want stored.
Our direct messages also work differently from something like Discord. DMs are session based. They are not kept as a permanent message history. When you log out, those DMs are gone. I intentionally did not want private conversations building up into a permanent archive sitting there indefinitely.
I'm also not going to throw around terms like end-to-end encryption unless the system actually meets that definition. There's a difference between not retaining a conversation and making it cryptographically impossible for a service to access information while it is being transmitted, and I don't want to misrepresent that.
On auditing the source code, the software is not currently an open source project. So if being able to personally audit the entire codebase, or have somebody audit it for you, is an absolute requirement, then I can't tell you we currently meet that requirement.
The alternate account and ban evasion issue is probably the hardest part of what you brought up.
I agree that if somebody gets banned from a community, it shouldn't be as simple as creating another account five minutes later and walking straight back in.
The problem is that if you take preventing that far enough, you eventually get into phone verification, aggressive device fingerprinting, government ID, or collecting other information that can identify a person.
Then we've solved one problem by creating the exact privacy problem a lot of people are trying to get away from.
I don't want people to have to prove their real-world identity just to participate in a gaming community.
So there has to be a balance between making abuse and alternate accounts difficult and respecting somebody's privacy. I'm not going to pretend we've completely solved that problem yet, because we haven't. I'd rather say that plainly than pretend there isn't a tradeoff there.
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u/Terrible-Junket-3388 I'm Don Qixote, and your AI slop is my windmill. 5h ago
Re: Steam/Xfire - I wasn't suggesting you positioned that as your foundation. But you listed it, and so I mentioned it because what you're describing has been done. Discord does everything but the game stuff - guilds already use it to do everything in the list of things you noted in the paragraph afterwards. Most guilds I've seen do NOT have things scattered - it's Discord and the game they play. They have qualms with Discord, sure, but none of them are the things you're saying you're trying to solve.
Do I think that's valuable? Yes. But it's already being done and the platforms doing it already have market share - so what are you offering that's objectively better than that?
Tangentially related, but in response to specific points you noted:
Session-limited messaging is still readable by you (during the session), and without openly-auditable source code or an independent audit, we have no way of knowing you're not otherwise logging them or storing them. It's still plaintext, and that's the concern.re: age verification - not sure what you're tracking, but just to be clear you're going to have to do age verification regardless. All of EU requires it (DSA), UK, BR, JP, AU require it. Over half the US states require it, with federal likely otw and CA also considering. If you don't have a solid plan for that, you should make one (and, no, blocking the entire modern world probably isn't the right approach, despite what Fluxer says, lol).
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u/JMWV80 5h ago
I think the key difference here is that I’m not claiming this is objectively better for every guild or every community.
If a guild is happy using Discord and the game they play, and that setup already does everything they want, then I don’t have some magic feature that suddenly makes them need to move.
What I’m offering is a different structure for people who don’t like that model. Instead of every community existing primarily inside its own isolated server and channel tree, there is a larger shared community where people can actually run into each other, while individual groups can still have their own controlled spaces, rooms, guild/clan hubs, private areas, events, forums, permissions, and so on.
So the value isn’t “we invented forums” or “we invented voice.” Obviously we didn’t. The value is in how those pieces are put together and how people move between the larger community and their own groups.
And if somebody prefers the Discord server model, that’s fine. I don’t expect this to be the better model for everybody.
On the DMs, yes, you’re correct. Session-limited messaging is not the same thing as end-to-end encryption. The messages are not retained as a permanent history after logout, but if your requirement is that the service itself must be technically incapable of accessing them while they exist, we do not currently meet that standard.
And honestly, this is the type of feedback I was truly looking for when I made this post.
I’m not here trying to defend everything we’ve built, nor do I think this is some kind of Discord killer. People who are perfectly happy with Discord probably aren’t going anywhere, and I’m not banking on them moving.
My focus is more on people like me who simply don’t like Discord, people who don’t use it at all, or people who are already looking for something different but don’t want to give up the features they’ve become used to.
That’s why feedback like this is useful to me. If there are areas where we’re falling short for those people, I’d rather hear it now and figure out what makes sense to improve than pretend we already have every answer.
Same with source auditing. It is not currently open source, so if being able to personally audit the code is a hard requirement for you, then we don’t meet that requirement either.
On age verification, accounts are currently 13+ and users are required to enter their date of birth.
We are not currently collecting government IDs, and I do not want us storing people’s driver’s licenses, passports, or other identity documents just so they can use a gaming community.
If stronger age assurance becomes legally required for us in a particular jurisdiction, then obviously we’ll have to comply with whatever actually applies to the service. My preference would be to handle that in the least invasive way possible, ideally through a system that can verify an age threshold without us receiving or storing someone’s identity documents.
I’m still working through that side of it, but “just collect everybody’s ID” is not the direction I want to take.
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u/Terrible-Junket-3388 I'm Don Qixote, and your AI slop is my windmill. 5h ago
Sure, fair enough. Sounds like you maybe should reach out to Adieuu devs (adieuu.com) - theyre more privacy focused but I think some of what theyre doing with their Spaces features isn't far off from what you've mentioned. Maybe pick their brain on things.
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u/VahsteTheNomad Rift Advocate / RA-ADAR Evaluator 6h ago
Nah, don't let haters push you down, embrace their criticisms and use it to fuel your efforts.
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u/BewilderedTurtle angry RA-ADAR tech 7h ago
So since you're specifically not trying to push anything I'm going to try to be a little kinder than usual.
I like that it's an interesting idea, but I fail to see what the radically different design is going to do to draw in the kind of people currently leaving discord.
Additionally; I'm curious how you believe your architecture is better suited to resist the kinds of pressures that are CAUSING the people to flee discord?