Welcome to the launch of the Melody Chat Platform and the Harmony server! We’ve had so many great people reach out over the past few weeks to encourage our team to get this project off the ground, it feels so good to announce that we’re actually ready to start inviting the community at large! Developers, creators or just chatters and more are all welcome to join our community! With so many big tech firms fighting each other on who will be the next to violate our privacy next, we hope that Melody Chat will be a breath of fresh air.
Over the next few weeks we will be organizing our self into a collective based governance system. Most likely this will be based on a version of Values Based Consensus (VBC) that will allow our collective to give everyone an equal voice, but also keep our group committed to the values we hold important (transparency, equality, self-sustainability, etc).
Melody Chat Platform
A big part of our project will be hosting an publicly available instance of our Harmony server for the community. This instance allows for anyone to make a guild as long as they follow our Acceptable Use Policy.
Want to try our platform? Join today:
Harmony Server
The Harmony Server is the main workhorse of our project. It contains the Discord Compatible API, gateway, CDN and voice gateway. While Harmony is a fork of the Spacebar Chat project, it will be taking a different approach. Parts of Spacebar are currently being fused with patch work pieces of C#/Dotnet, and while this is a valid choice by the Spacebar team we would like to focus our efforts on the existing TypeScript codebase. By doing this we hope to increase our API compatibility and move into a future where we can even provide Harmony exclusive features and capabilities that do not break existing functionality (optional end to end encryption for direct messages, for example).
The Harmony project is hosted on Codeberg, as part of our commitment to using free and open source tooling as well as avoiding hosting in the United States due to its privacy hostile laws. You can find the Harmony git repository here:
Commitments to the Community
We would like to make the following commitments to our community, contributors and other stake holders
Our commitment can even be seen by our choice of the name “Harmony” as the name of our flagship project. Harmony was slated to be the name of the original project after a naming contest was held with the community. And although the name Harmony won the competition and the person who proposed it was paid, the name was never adopted. We strongly feel that by adopting this name we do so as a re-commitment to sourcing our ideas and culture from our community.
Additionally we’d like to take this time to make the following commitments:
- We will focus on refactoring and improving existing code, without taking a detour to switch programming languages unless necessary to solve a problem
- We will aspire to use free and open tooling whenever possible
- We will provide an open and transparent governance process allowing members of our project in good standing to participate. There will be no gods, no masters, no kings nor queens.
- We will avoid usage of tool-chains, services and hosting providers that are subject to aggressive anti-privacy laws (like the US Cloud Act)
Contribute
Contributors are welcome, and its not just code that we could use a hand with. Translations, documentation, graphic design, help with issue triage are all very welcome. If you would like to help but don’t know where to start please get in touch with our team: