(b) ok, fine, then include any english anywhere (in the source code, in the incompatible_browser.html.erb, in CLAUDE.md, whatever) so future generations would have any sane reason to mutate those magic numbers

I was impressed they all are crippled for self-hosted version. They ask unreasonable price for organisations. One of my colleagues, they have an organisation of somewhat 50…100 people, but their work isn’t with computers even. So half of the employees are going to check the messages from their mobiles. They use whatever everyone uses, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram. I thought of offering them some managed (by me, plus other nerds from the company) instance.

Yet, Zulip allows only 10 people mobile notifications for free. Otherwise, it’s $3.5 a month, per user, so I assume that would be $350 a month per 100 users. Even considering 75 of them won’t chat 99% of the time. They might receive some short messages during the day and ‘OK’ them. Not that it’s too much, but it’s $350 a month for those 25 managers, in perpetuity. They can use whatever else for free. (I know, privacy, but most people don’t understand and don’t care.) I guess that was the pitch for Once Campfire as a product. You pay the price, $300, once, and it’s yours. You deploy it, and you have your little company chat forever. Instead of paying the same price monthly. For a less-than-250 employees company (which is most companies, I think), it should work off the relatively cheap Digital Ocean / Hetzner droplet. Or even a real server (a Mac Mini?) in the office.

Mattermost nags you to buy their Enterprise offering, it’s everywhere in the interface. Again, it’s 10 a user a month, and for the 100 heads company, it’s just a ridiculous $1K a month.

Rocket Chat has a bad history, according to very brief research. So I don’t even consider them.

I don’t like this pitch that managing a chat is a tremendous chore. For some companies, it’s not like some life-and-death situation. In the example I gave, when a company uses some third-party free tier (Slack, MS Teams, whatever) or even a public messenger (WhatsApp, Facebook, Telegram), they can easily return there if their primary one is broken for some reason. But in reality, I expect once deployed, this thing needs backups and just works most of the time. And does not ask a ridiculous price to pay.

You clone the GitHub link, then `cd` there and run docker:

   docker build -t campfire .
   docker run \
     --publish 3000:3000 \
     --volume campfire:/rails/storage \
     --env SECRET_KEY_BASE=$(docker run --rm campfire bin/rails secret) \
     --env DISABLE_SSL=1 \
     campfire

   sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

   sudo docker run --rm campfire bin/rails secret

I did all that on Linux, so I have no idea how to do that on macOS.

As a final step, you visit either localhost:3000 or ip-addr:3000 and play with the chat.