So I put together Promptuaria over a few days. It's a small platform where you can publish, version, and fork software specs, and link GitHub implementations to the exact spec versions they were built from so you can confront them.

Specs are Git-versioned under the hood, with immutable published versions.

It's an early side project, but I'm curious to know if others see specs becoming something we share and reuse, pretty much like code.

Would love to hear what you think!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50276576

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Discord is good for realtime chat, Discourse and Zulip are better for things that should be preserved, but I kept wanting one place that did both and was actually tied to the project itself.

So on Earde you connect a public GitHub repo and get:

-live chat -a public forum indexed by search engines -turning useful chat conversations into permanent forum threads -connections between related project communities, so the same discussion can be shared between them in one click -usable directly in the browser -one feed for all the project communities you follow

I know you can approximate most of these things by combining existing tools, the experiment here is whether they make more sense as one thing, specifically for OSS projects.

It's still very early, so I'm interested in what feels wrong or missing, especially from maintainers who already have a Discord/Zulip/Discourse/etc. for their project.

You can browse the app without creating an account here: https://www.earde.com/feed And here's a demo of a public technical thread shared between communities: https://www.earde.com/c/northstar/t/116-client-enters-a-reco...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49257310

Points: 1

# Comments: 4

Earde 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.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49183466

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

I’m trying to understand whether this is just an abstract annoyance or whether there are actual communities looking for a better platform.

Discord is good for quick conversation, but bad as the long-term home of a technical community. That is because technical discussions are not indexed by search engines and useful answers disappear into history. Identical questions keep coming back again and again, pinned messages and FAQs become overloaded, it is hard to organize different topics cleanly and good discussions are hard to link, browse, preserve, and build on.

Reddit is good for discovery and for having many communities in one place, but once you enter a subreddit, everything is basically one feed. That works for some communities, but it becomes messy when you need real structure with different sections, recurring questions, technical discussions, resources, and long term memory.

I also think Reddit is weak for real community building. Old forums had a Presentations/New Members section and local reputation (number of contributions for that specific community) visible in every post/comment and that made people recognizable after a while. Reddit often feels like a hivemind and if I think about it, I probably couldn’t remember three usernames there, while I can still remember at least ten people from forums I was involved in as a kid.

I like the idea of having one central, easy-to-use place where people can discover and join different communities, like Reddit. But once you enter a community, I don’t really want it to be just one endless subreddit feed. I want it to be like a forum, with sections/categories, persistent posts, searchable discussions, local reputation, and some sense of accumulated community memory. At the same time, I understand why so many people moved to Discord. Forums often feel dead, while chat feels alive. Sometimes you just want to ask a quick question, have a random talk, share memes, or see that other people are around. But I don’t need a chatroom awkwardly forced to be a forum. I need a good forum with a live chat.

Basically what I would like to have is Reddit, but the subreddits are forums, and there is a live chat. Does there exist something like this? Do some of you have the same issue? I am already trying to build something to solve this problem for my community, and maybe it can be extended and be useful for other people too, but if there is already a solution for this please tell me!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48308719

Points: 10

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