Show HN: Communick. Privacy-respecting social media and messaging hosting

2 points

6 years ago

Communick has been one of my on-again/off-again side projects for almost 5 years now. The idea started when I was working at T-Labs (Innovation arm from T-Mobile) who wanted to go after the big software companies in the messaging space. As ambitious as their ideas were, it didn't take off because it was trying to do too many things to too many people.

The idea for Communick is simple: instead of trying to recreate everything from scratch, just take every best-in-class service in the messaging and social media space and make it as worry-free as possible for everyone to use.

At first, we are hosting:

   - Matrix
   - XMPP
   - Mastodon

One of the things that we are doing differently as a way to break the chicken-and-egg problem is to offer group packages. You (the privacy freak) can buy a group package of 10 accounts and then invite friends. For those that value their privacy and understand TINSTAAFL, it's a small price (really, our introductory price is less than $0.15/user/month!)

Focus on privacy is so big, a lot of the late work was to make it easy to accept crypto. Ethereum and ERC20 tokens like Brave's BAT or DAI. Email addresses are not required for signing-up. I am hosting the servers in Germany, no user data stored in the US. I am also only supporting messaging services where end-to-end encryption is easy to be adopted by anyone. I also put together a discourse instance at https://support.communick.com to provide help and hopefully create more documentation and guides to help non-technical people to adopt these services.

It would be great if you could take a look, join and let me know your thoughts and feedback to make this better and more useful.

Thanks!