Unifier Micro: a light and open source global chat bot
Last updated
Last updated
Earlier, we took the unifier-legacy repo down again after some drama erupted from ex-community members. Incidents like these discourage us from opening up our code for others to use, which is why open sourcing Unifier has been delayed by quite a lot.
But after something personal that's happened (I'm not gonna comment on it, so don't bother asking), I felt like it'd be a good idea to start opening up Unifier to the world, so anyone can come and use Unifier for their own purpose. Since we've been working on Unifier Micro for the past week, we thought it'd be a good idea to open source this version and see how things go.
Micro is basically Unifier, but only the core features. It has a simple but efficient bridge to bridge messages over from one server to another, and has pretty much all the commands you'd need for a global chat bot.
What Micro isn't is a cross-platform bridge bot. We wanted to make Micro an efficient global chat bot that uses very little memory, and adding Revolt and Guilded support wouldn't let us achieve this, as we need to run two separate bots as subprocesses to get the bridge to work. Besides, we would need to take the pre-v1.1 approach by writing a bridge for each platform, which would make things much harder to maintain.
For a more detailed comparison, you can check the .
We made Micro for small communities that just need something efficient and straightforward, unlike Unifier which is built for communities of scale throughout multiple platforms that can spare some time and resources in configuring and maintaining Unifier.
Also, we wanted a version of Unifier that's even easier to install, so if we needed to deploy Unifier somewhere then we can just use Micro if it fits.
Even if your community is big, we recommend you use Micro first, so you can get a glimpse of what the full version is like and decide if it's right for your server and worth the extra time needed to configure everything. Since Micro is much easier to install, you'll need to spend significantly less time getting things running, making it a good "trial" version.
Also, in case you didn't know, we have config.json and data.json files for bot configuration and data respectively. These files are cross-compatible (for config.json, you may want to copy the values over to the matching keys on Unifier's config template instead), so you can use Micro then switch to Unifier while keeping the freedom to switch right back with minimal friction.
Like we said, we still have concerns about potential misuse. So we want this to be some sort of pilot program, so we can see how open sourcing our bot will have an impact on the community. As Micro is slower and less capable than Unifier, those who wish to create hate groups using the bot would find it much harder, because Unifier is built for a limited number of small communities, rather than many communities of scale.
We'll also consult maintainers of popular open source projects sometime soon, so we can see what would the best way forward for us to be in these situations.
So once we've researched everything we need to, we can decide whether to open source it or keep it closed. We understand your patience while we work this out!
Both versions will be completely free (free as in price and ), so you'll have the freedom to choose whatever version suits your use case completely, and also switch between the versions depending on your new needs.
Depends on how you view it, but we wouldn't really call it "modernized Legacy".
Micro is a completely rewritten version that contains some Unifier code in it as well. Although the structure may look similar (such as the @bot.commands), it's actually a completely different bot. You'll get what I mean when you look at the bridge code inside the on_message function.
Speaking of which, we've made Legacy open source again.
Micro is AGPLv3 licensed. Once you modify Micro's source code, it automatically becomes a derivative work, and you must open source your modded version under the same AGPLv3 license or newer (e.g. AGPLv4, not AGPLv2, GPLv3 or LGPLv3) to stay AGPLv3-compliant. If you cannot accept the conditions of the AGPLv3 license, you may not use Unifier Micro, and you must destroy all copies of the software. (This is not a threat by the way, we literally can't give you a license if you can't accept the conditions.)
Do note that some of Micro's code is MIT licensed, as those parts have been based on another MIT licensed work. You can find more info about these external licenses in the EXTERNAL_LICENSES.txt file.
It's just some repository containing release metadata so Unifier Upgrader can know if there's been a new update. Micro doesn't use this, so you won't need to think much about this for now.
Micro will release Tuesday, April 16. Once it's live, you can download it and run it for yourself, so you can connect your communities or/and get ready for Unifier once that's open source too.
First, you'll need to download the code from the . Then, you can follow the guide for self-hosted instances to learn how to install and configure Micro.
No! We want to make Unifier benefit everyone, not only those who are willing to pay a premium for a more capable version. We understand our full scale product can be really helpful in scenarios like , so we want it to be helpful to as many people as possible.
Of course, as long as you follow the conditions shown in .
