The story of Unifier/UniChat
Why we begun what we're doing, and how we progressed.
The problem
Some time ago, I met my friends on a Discord server about some game that we both played together. We even formed an alliance in it, and we had a good time. But there was a problem with the server - we could not discuss much in there.
We could only talk about the game and its themes, nothing more. If we talked about trains, muted. If we talked about cars, muted. If we talked about the manga My Life Is Just As Wrong As I Expected After Traveling to Another World Where Iām...yeah I'm not gonna say the whole name, you get the point and I'd rather not fill up the entire blog post with a comically long manga title.
So we ended up talking in our alliance Discord more, just like other alliances have been doing. But there was one problem: our Discord was far smaller, and the people we could freely converse with were pretty much limited to whoever was in our Discord server.
And when we reconciled with our former enemy and made them our ally, I used this as an excuse to kick off a project that would solve these problems.
The solution
We came up with Unifier. The name "Unifier" was only a working name at that time and I planned to change it to something more human (like Nevira). But the more we worked on the bot and the more we used it, the better it fit with the bot, so in the end the working name became the final name for Unifier.
Simple beginnings
Unifier was simple as pie at the beginning. It only had support for one main room, and its members consisted of our alliance and our ally.
We could not edit messages, nor delete messages. The only thing we could do through Unifier at the the is just send messages with basic attachments, and no more. Hell, it didn't even have a profile picture. It was just Discord's generic red profile picture, no more.
But the very day after Unifier opened up shop to the public, we added multi-room support, and added SHA256-based identifiers for easier moderation. As we kept updating, more people came.
And this couldn't have been achieved without the native user interface.
The user interface
Unifier's user interface is, simply put, almost completely native. This means you almost never need to do work figuring out what's what when you're looking at the chat, because the way messages are sent look exactly like how they do regularly in non-UniChat rooms.
When I (Green) looked at other solutions out there that did pretty much what Unifier does too, I noticed that the UI wasn't as native as I wanted it to be. Some bots would have something like this:
And some other bots would have something completely different, which meant I had to "translate" the UI so I could understand.
And thus, the Unifier UI was born. It's nothing unique, just as I intended it to not be. Less uniqueness and more similarity with the regular interface makes recognizing things much easier for everyone.
Then the community grew
As we improved, we managed to get more alliances interested in the idea as well. As more players joined us and them, we got more people chatting on Unified Chat. At some point, we were managing to get around 100 messages every day.
While I, Green, laid the first bricks, ItsAsheer joined in on the team and reinforced it with concrete. Unifier's code was very poorly written at that time, and he contributed a lot to making the code much easier to work with for the v0.3.0 release. So if you want to thank me for bringing Unifier this far, make sure to thank him too, since he gave Unifier development a big boost.
Controversies
Unifier did not come without controversies of its own. We've generally been in the clear so far, but we did have one big hiccup, rather recently too at the time of writing this (Feb 21, 2024). So what was the controversy? Did the developers say something controversial? Did Unifier have a data breach? What was it?????
Well, none of them. We didn't say anything too controversial that we'd get the entirety of Twitter (I refuse to call it X) against us, and we don't store identifiable (except Discord IDs) and sensitive data for a data breach to cause significant issues to begin with. Instead, it was something quite childish, which I used to show on here but I decided to take it down since it's not really worth keeping it in here now.
Unifier/UniChat today
Performance upgrades (and a PFP for once)
Today, both Unifier and Unified Chat have improved so much. Unifier finally has a profile picture, made by me and refined by thegodlypenguin. Basically, I made the base design, while they added the gradient and shadow to make it next-level. We've also improved Unifier's performace by up to 2x, so messages send even faster than before (pre-v0.3.9).
More active than a 15k server
Over the weeks as we delivered upgrades to Unifier, we've grown, and we've grown a lot, as a community formed of Unifier's developers, moderators, and chatters. Between February 5, 2024 and February 11, 2024, we were nearly as active as the very server we wanted to provide an alternative to. We matched 83.7% of the server's activity, which is already a very big accomplishment for a ~400-member community going against a ~15800-member Discord server.
And it didn't end there. Between February 12 and February 18, we saw a great increase in activity, despite some drama that led to one server pulling the plug. Not only did we manage to be as active as our competitor, but we also surpassed them by having 176.6% activity compared to them. And as of February 21, even when we're just halfway into the week, we're still going strong, having 224.9% activity (this will likely be lower by the end of the week).
This is no big achievement, and we attribute this success to the freedom of civil speech we maintain in our community. We do not restrict people to a certain topic or two, anyone is able to discuss about anything as long as it's something everyone's comfortable with. Naturally, this leads to more conversations, as there's more things to talk about.
And not only that, Unifier is also designed to come with freedom for every server however they see fit. For example, people would want to join the main room, but not the rest. That's completely fine!
Tomorrow
We aren't stopping here. Unifier may be a very complete bot with its v0.4.0 release out, but there's a lot of things we need to do and want to do. We're always looking for feedback, so we don't end up in a roadblock not knowing where to go from here.
We're also working on a way to bridge Discord messages to Revolt, and vice versa. We're considering adding support for Guilded too once we manage to complete Revolt support, so stay tuned!
