The Lounge VS PhotoPrism

IRC as a protocol is indeed incredibly simple and easy to get started with. Years ago did discover this when I was able to make [this atrocity](https://github.com/creesch/discordIRCd) bridging IRC and discord where for IRC I effectively did a simple server implementation.

There is a caveat, though. Like many older protocols (ftp) there is a lot that was not initially written down or left up to clients and server implementations. This, does lead to a lot of edge cases you need to be aware of once you want to actually support a wider user group.

Also, as this is apparently is still a discussion. IRC is not simple from a modern user UX perception. Registration can be complex and confusing, though hidden a bit through clients. Managing channels with various flags is a whole other thing. Then there is also the fact that these days people are no longer used to the fact that they can't see messages from periods where they were not connected. Of course, the latter can be easily handled by a BNC or fancy clients like https://thelounge.chat . But, that is only easy for technically inclined folks.

> It’s 2024, people aren’t going to go out of their way to setup “bouncers” to keep up with conversation that happens when they’re not online or leave their computer running 24/7.

You can just set up something like The Lounge [0].

[0] https://thelounge.chat/

Excellent idea! You'll have a mature, open standard protocol under the hood, with no vendor lock-in, excellent extensibility, and great modern frontends like The Lounge (https://thelounge.chat/) or Convos (https://convos.chat/) to choose from (and you can choose).

For the other layers one can front-end IRC with TheLounge [1][2] or Convos [3][4]. TheLounge only persists history in private mode meaning that users are created in that front-end and chat messages are in Redis. For small networks or groups of friends this is probably fine.

Notably missing is voice chat. I use the Mumble client [5] with the Murmur or uMurmur [6] server which is light-weight enough to run on ones home router. I use it on Alpine Linux, works great. It's not a shiny and attention grabbing as Discord but probably fine for everyone else. For people to create their own voice channels would require the full-blown Murmur server.

[1] - https://github.com/thelounge

[2] - https://thelounge.chat/

[3] - https://github.com/convos-chat/convos/

[4] - https://convos.chat/

[5] - https://www.mumble.info/

[6] - https://github.com/umurmur/umurmur/wiki/Configuration

As another self-hosted solution, I quite like TheLounge (https://thelounge.chat)

TheLounge (https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge) - web IRC client that I set to listen on my vpn/mesh. Works great on desktop and mobile, and supports push notifications.

I have been using https://www.photoprism.app for a couple of years, and it works better than expected, with the latest updates it's actually quite fast and the face tagging works reasonably well.

For self-hosting, there's Photoprism[1] as well.

Ente's strength lies in end-to-end encryption[2] and its cloud[3] offering so you don't have to worry about reliability.

So if self-hosting is what you're after, Immich, Photoprism and Damselfly (TIL!) are perhaps better designed to serve your needs.

[1]: https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism

[2]: https://ente.io/architecture

[3]: https://ente.io/reliability

For quite a while I'm also in search for a solution which allows me to share galleries with my family, without having to ask them to jump through hoops in order to access them.

After some searching I'm now testing photoprism [1] which is a fantastic application, especially for self-hosting of photos. There's no mobile app for it (yet) and user-management is just starting to get implemented, but it shows alot of promise. Unfortunately not yet enough for putting it on the tablet of my granny but one can hope (and donate!)

Either way, I'm afraid that building a good mobile gallery app is an equally large task, after all the best solution would be to replace the users' native gallery-app with an equivalent that also supports custom Online-Galleries...

[1]: https://www.photoprism.app/

out of curiosity, why no sort-of-established pkg and internal dirs? What do you think of https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism structure?

Thank you!

Ente was first a piece of hardware, then a self-host-able project, but we had a hard time monetizing both, which lead to the E2EE pivot.

TIL about TagSpaces, thanks!

Our server can be open-sourced, but we're unsure of the value E2EE will provide, with services like Photoprism[1] and Immich[2] already doing a good job of serving customers who prefer to self host. In this context E2EE might become a constraint, rather than a feature.

[1]: https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism

[2]: https://github.com/immich-app/immich

Ive seen github issues like this one https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism/issues/907 in which it is implied that this is very very difficult.

Hi. I want to implement an image server similar to Photoprism using ImageAI to tag images based on objects and context. However I don't want to spend to much time working on the frontend, at first I were thinking about using Danbooru and use Flexbooru or the web interface on my phone. But it doesn't have any encryption or password protection (since the purpose of it is to be used as a public image board).

https://www.photoprism.app in Docker.

PhotoPrism[0] and some ugly plumbing[1] to semantically tag all images in the gallery.

0: https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism