He’s not complaining about it missing the features he wants, he’s complaining about it missing features of the products it’s presenting itself as an alternative to

As a major supporter of free software, I can't believe how many times I encounter this reply. No, not everyone has the resources nor skills to dedicate to a random unknown free software project online.

Criticism is helpful and can inspire others who do have the time and skills to direct or fork the project into something more useful.

Criticism can be helpful indeed; it's the form that triggers this kind of response. Let's try this one more time:

> Very impressive project! It's neat that you can get this far without relying on any central servers at all. Personally though, I'm missing a couple more features – this only has textual chat and file sharing, while Discord or Slack have a lot more niche features. Achieving feature parity is a prerequisite for getting any user base nowadays, so I hope it is something team would account for before the 1.0 launch :-)

It’s incredible how tone-deaf to their own tone of voice people can be.

This happens sometimes, yeah. We're all just mere humans after all.

(Quiet founder here)

I agree with the objection that not everybody can just contribute patches for major features to an open source project, and I think it's fair to say that the comparison to Slack and Discord is not 1:1 without voice and video calls (which we do plan to offer someday, FWIW) and to feel disappointed by that. Though I think when an open source alternative emerges it is usually understood that it could take a while to get to feature parity, and we try to be very clear about what Quiet already does and doesn't do yet on our homepage.

That said, Quiet is written in TypeScript and built on a web stack almost every engineer is somewhat familiar with, so it's really easy to get hacking on, and we'd love the help. :)

Here are the instructions to build Quiet desktop: https://github.com/TryQuiet/quiet/blob/develop/packages/desk...

And here are some good first issues! https://github.com/orgs/TryQuiet/projects/3/views/1?filterQu...

Agreed, the web stack should definitely help get some contributions. I might take a look too :-)

Tangential but have you considered something like https://tauri.app/ instead of Electron for the app? (One of my major concerns with Electron apps is that every app ships and runs its own copy of Chromium – Tauri mitigates that by using system web engine instead.)

We might switch to Tauri someday. Death-by-a-thousand-cuts is a very serious risk for us though, so we're trying to choose the most mature and widely-used tools whenever possible.

As noted on our website, we still have a lot of work to do on security (including some open issues you could probably tackle! and thanks for expressing interest!!) so it will be a wonderful day when Electron's lag in staying up to date with Chrome security fixes is our most pressing security issue!

In the meantime, if Signal chooses Electron that is a good indicator that, all things considered, it is a good choice for us. They have a lot more resources than us, are much farther along than we are, and they take security seriously.

One immediate issue with Tauri, just to give an example, is that it would require us to worry about Safari quirks on Mac.

I've also heard from projects in our space that the handling of platform-specific functionality outside the browser window is not as mature in Tauri as it is in Electron. This is totally understandable and Tauri is a great project with great goals, but the possibility of running into some deal-breaker Windows-specific issue, say, is scary.

Not everyone but thousands here in HN, I'm checking right now how to integrate it in my app and change the messaging platform to Quiet and maybe even the data sync between peers for other collaborative stuff

Completely beside the point. The comment you’re replying to was simply questioning the headline.

OP implies that the devs were the ones who wrote the headline though. They clearly stated that it is not (yet) a sound alternative to Discord.

The About section of the repo literally says "A private, p2p alternative to Slack and Discord built on Tor & IPFS ".

So the dev(s) are indeed claiming it's an alternative to both Slack and Discord.

As much as I hate to say that, they are right. If you want to be a significant competitor to centralized plateforms, you gotta at least do as much at them.

and from where would you start? How should the project be defined if they are yet not an alternative? The "soon to be if people contribute" P2P alternative to slack and discord?

This is an extremely toxic attitude and helps no one.