minimum viable chat

all my friends seem to be building chat apps as their pet projects these days. i find they usually do so because existing solutions are lacking in one or more ways; their projects often aim to improve the chat experience in areas such as:

• interface customization
• identity management
• security/encryption capabilities
• (de)centralization of identity and/or messages

minimum viable chat does none of this. it doesn't give a fuck what you want, and you're probably going to find it charming enough to fuck with it for a while anyway. this is due to the core advantage it has over its competitors:

• it actually exists

you can use minimum viable chat right now.¹ or you can run your own instance somewhere else and give it to your friends and use it that way. or you can just laugh at this shitpost of a project and move on, that's fine too. but you can't deny that it it exists now.

usage

node shit.mjs

listens on port 80 by default; override with the PORT environment variable.

derivative works

this project has successfully inspired multiple friends to get off their asses and start on their own chat projects which are both real and more functional!

• semi-minimum viable chat, at semi.minimumviable.chat
• minimumest viable chat, at streaming.minimumviable.chat

if you've been similarly inspired to bring a chat app into existence, good or bad, as a result of this shitpost - let me know! i'll add your project to this list, and if you want i'll even CNAME a subdomain of minimumviable.chat to you if it would suit your project.

license

the below offer has been taken by 7, who now holds the copyright to this code. legally, this shit is her problem now.

i will assign this code's copyright to the next person who donates ten dollars to my ko-fi. i am writing this document while bored in the las vegas airport on a five hour layover and all the food here is so fucking expensive oh my god dude i just wanted a slice of pizza.

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1. at least, for now. this domain was on sale for the first year and i might let it expire instead of paying full price for it next year. and also you guys are probably freaks who are going to fill up my vps's disk with garbage immediately. im a shitty queer web developer not a content moderator or sysadmin or particularly interested in doing what you want me to do. but if neither of those things has happened yet you can probably use the app. ↩︎