Bringing back Hotline

[Dt990]

Anyone remember Hotline?P Probably some here missed out on the first viral file-sharing app for the Mac but some of you are old enough to remember.

If you don't think, Discord-esque with file sharing. Hotline is still around and usable with Macs from the 1990s. There are three components to Hotline: the client, the server, and the tracker. Clients let you connect to servers where you can chat/post/download files. Servers let you host your own private servers from your computer. Trackers let you find servers. Several community members, including me, are working on modern software, all of which is open source. We're working on bringing more modern features, like E2E, chat history, and more, to Hotline

• Hotline - a native Swift UI client
• Hotline Navigator - A client for macOS/Windows/Linux and iOS/iPadOS/Android for sideloaders
• Mobius - a modern CLI server written in Go that works on multiple platforms
• MobiusAdmin - Swift UI wrapper to make starting a server as easy as pointing and clicking

Anyhow, just figured a few of you out there might be interested.

 

[MacGizmo]

Ah... the good old days. Between Napster and Hotline, you could lose days just surfing through trackers to find servers that have what you're looking for... and hours scouring through what else was on any particular server after you found what you were looking for.

 

[Dt990]

Ah... the good old days. Between Napster and Hotline, you could lose days just surfing through trackers to find servers that have what you're looking for... and hours scouring through what else was on any particular server after you found what you were looking for.

Yeah, I think there's a place for this sort of thing again for the ability share files among friends now that most people have has fast internet, streaming services are getting more expensive, everything is a damn subscription and privacy invasive, storage has gotten cheap or it did for a long time, and everyone has old computers.

The goal for me is to make sharing files and making servers for friends extremely low friction. There might be a niche for a Discord-like experience that's totally decentralized for chatting with friends without corporate oversight. Anyhow, I'm working on making Hotline Navigator support basically anything server authors are willing create. I hope my client is like the ground floor, and other people make more bespoke clients for various platforms.