How NOT to make a Bridge Bot
A commentary on our "silly" competitor and why it's a perfect example of what NOT to do.
If you've used Unifier before, you probably know that Unifier is an open source cross-server (and cross-platform) bridge bot, built for communities of all sizes. We'd like to introduce you to Silly Chat: an open source competitor bot that does similar things our bot does. The developer claims that their bot is better than ours, but there's one big problem that stops it from being truly better than ours.
We feel like this "one big problem" is one worth discussing in our blog, because we feel like this is something all bridge bot developers (and developers for all products, actually) should steer clear of.
To show you what I mean, here's a comparison between our bot, and his bot.
Intro to both products
Unifier is our own home-grown bridge bot that connects communities of any scale, across various platforms. It's a rather new player in the world of bridge bots, but it comes with features that make it stand out from the crowd, such as an ultrafast bridge and moderation commands.
Silly Chat, on the other hand, is Silly Development CEO Gamer3514's bridge bot, connecting various servers together. Like we said, their developer thinks his product is much better than ours, so we want to put it to the test.
Speed
Verdict: Unifier wins
When it comes to speed, Unifier absolutely dominates. There's no arguing.
Unifier is the fastest bridge bot known so far, sporting an insane speed of 24 messages per second. If Unifier is in 24 servers, all 24 servers will receive your message in just a second. And this is only the tested speed, it could theoretically reach up to 70 messages per second if it wanted to (we accidentally found this out after some multicore bridge testing went horribly wrong).
We attribute this success to the use of concurrent processing and use of memory to store webhooks and messages. With concurrent processing, we're able to bridge to multiple servers at the same time, instead of waiting half a second for things to finish sending before we bridge to another server. And with storing objects in memozy, we can fetch them much faster, instead of waiting for the API or DB to respond.
Silly Chat, on the other hand, is...not so great.
But to be fair, Silly Chat v3 is in the works, which promises even faster performance. We're actually excited for this - we really want to see more ultrafast bridge bots out there, instead of seeing slow and basic bots that aren't built for larger communities.
Platforms
Verdict: Unifier wins
Once again, Unifier wins here, but Silly Chat's developer is working hard to catch up (apparently). Silly Chat only supports Discord for now, though they are adding Guilded support.
Not only does Unifier support Discord, Revolt, and Guilded, it will also soon support virtually any platform with Plugins. Silly Chat only supports Discord, but it'll support Guilded in the future too, and possibly Revolt.
Unifier's Plugins system is what really lets us have the edge here. If there's a platform we don't officially support, you can always install (or make) Plugins to add support. And the best part is, you'll be able to integrate your Plugin with Unifier Bridge soon thanks to NUPS, making sending and managing bridged messages easy.
THE BIG PROBLEM: Features
Verdict: Unifier wins, and we're not happy with how we won.
This is where Silly Chat is absolutely abysmal at. If Gamer could improve one thing about Silly Chat, it's this - it's too abysmal that we're actually upset that we won by a landslide (this is not an insult or anything, we're actually disappointed).
Here at UnifierHQ, we take our job seriously (not when we're using our own product, but when we're managing it). Developers, including me, work on features that contribute significantly to the core experience, instead of gimmick and bloat features nobody expecting a "versatile global chat bot" would ever ask for. Moderators keep a high moderating standard, not jumping the gun if they're unsure what they should do and instead asking for a peer review. This is only one of many reasons why Unifier is as successful as it is today.
Silly Chat doesn't do any of this.
One can argue that I'm just being salty, because Silly Chat has way more commands than Unifier does. But the command count doesn't matter to me, because it's not an accurate reflection of the "features" a bot has. For example, some features run in the background without user interaction (like bridging and status switching), so if you consider these, the feature count of each bot would be quite off from the commands count.
But what matters to me is that way too many of Silly Chat's commands are pure gimmick commands, as you'll see below (do note that these are only some of the bot's commands, not all of them):
Out of these commands shown, none of these shouts "global chat bot". This makes Silly Chat feel like a gimmick bot with a touch on global chat on top and not the other way around, which is why this needs a lot of work done. You worked on Silly Chat for a year, Gamer. A whole damn year. One year of Silly Chat, for this.
Meanwhile, we've only spent 7 months on Unifier as of writing this, and we've added more features than a lot of bridge bots out there. We've also done a lot of firsts, like adding the NUPS system to Modifiers to support not just one or two platforms but any platform. All of the features we add make Unifier faster and more versatile, but also one of the most customizable bots out there. And we didn't even need a whole year to achieve all this, because we actually made the useful features usable instead of focusing on AI and image generation commands.
Conclusion (and the problem)
As you've seen, Unifier wins by pretty much a landslide, and I could've talked about even more things that make our product even better. For example, I could talk about how our competitor likes to boast about how their product is "easier to setup" than ours, when they literally use a hard-coded value for the bot owner's ID, which is quite the opposite of "easy setup" because you'd actually need to edit the source code.
Silly Chat's development, is unfortunately, full of shitty decisions, and the developer still has the balls to call our own bot shit despite his own shortcomings he hasn't bothered fixing yet (despite us giving him more than enough lectures, because we actually want more competition). This is exactly why I wrote this article, not because we hate competition (we actually want more competition, it's saddening to see a lot of people considering us as the only usable open-source cross-platform bridge bot) but because we cannot stand looking at the current place and direction of Silly Chat.
The "shitty decisions" are the decisions Silly Chat's developer made when developing his product. We wouldn't have made this comparison if the only problem was that his bot was inferior to ours, we made this comparison because we wanted to show how much he's wasting his time into useless things instead of realizing his product's true potential, and yet thinking his bot is better than everyone else's. He could've used the time he spent developing those AI commands into improving speed and latency, or maybe even adding support for editing or deleting messages. But he didn't.
We love having competition, it's what encourages competitors to innovate. When developers innovate, bridge bots become better as a whole, and thus more people use them. This is why we believe that faster and versatile bridge bots like Unifier are paramount to make online communities more connected and free from platform lock-in, which is something we want to realize. But making a significantly inferior bot, then calling it a "competitor" does NOT contribute whatsoever to realizing this mission of ours.
So it would be great if Gamer could focus on improving in these areas for Silly Chat v3 instead of being stuck in his superiority complex (and crashing Embotic then denying all responsibility AND banning me from Silly Development because I kicked someone with that one Austrian painter guy in their profile pic out), because if we're brutally honest, Silly Chat right now is nothing but a pile of "wasted potential", unless its purpose is to teach bridge bot devs what not to do.
Or in ChatGPT's own words, since Silly Chat's so full of AI gimmicks: "it’s like having a fancy car with lots of shiny features but no engine to drive it".
And that concludes my rant on Silly Chat. Please don't be like them if you want to make your own bridge bot.
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