Flame

Why Flame?

Most of us came from Discord, where we no longer felt home because of what direction they were going. The company was increasingly broadening its target audience and separating itself further from the individual. The new features became mostly focused on pushing Nitro subscriptions as the platform became more paid-to-use than it had ever promised to be. We felt pushed out, and in our search for another place we found there was simply nothing quite like we were now expecting. Being strong believers in the philosophy that if you point out a problem, you have to come up with a solution too, we decided to start work on Flame to make that a reality.

What makes Flame different?

Flame stands for versatility and personalization, so there are a few fundamental principles that distinguish Flame from other places like Discord and Reddit:

1. Flame gives power to communities
   We are anything but just another chat application. Flame gives tools such as Place Rules, Place Scripts and Place Automations to communities that makes Flame a sandbox to use and abuse. Want to make a podcast set where people can tune in and tag along in a live chat? Go ahead! How about a place for your blogposts, photography work or game update announcements that people can comment on? Why not a Q&A board, or a discussion forum, or just a regular chat server? We encourage all forms of communication!


2. Flame goes back to the basics
   Our early stages were very long as we thought about how to approach this. In the end we realized that at the core of everything is a message. A single message. By going back to the basics and asking ourselves 'Why not?' every time we assumed something about what a message should be, we created something that puts the power and decision in your hands. Messages can be the start to a forum thread, they can contain loads of attachments like albums, or they can be edited by mods like Q&A discussion boards. You get to decide.


3. Flame is a place to express yourself
   On a lot of socials like Twitter and Discord the focus is on interaction and not individuals and so we tend to make websites with carrd or wix to represent ourselves. Flame wants to change that by giving you the ability to do what you want with the platform. Some keywords are fully customizable profile pages, widget-based homepage and more. We encourage power-users, and so one of our big features is the way you interact with Flame. Flame lets you be in multiple places at any time in a browser-like tab fashion. You can have customizable macros/shortcuts and create your own quick settings on a homepage.


4. Flame offers simplicity not by a lack of features, but a lack of confusion
   Places like Reddit and Discord have a lot to them, but something like Twitter is just plain not enough for some in terms of feature set. At Flame we try to go for a no-compromises approach to this problem. We want to empower your with all the tools you didn't even know you wanted, packed in a neat front-end solution that is easy to get. By utilizing things like community-made presets called Place Plugins, Place Functions and Place Themes, all the new guy has to do to start utilizing 100% of Flame's strength is type in a search bar!

How will Flame sustain itself?

One large criticism we have on Discord is their so called "bait-and-switch" strategy, where you promise great free things while burning through cash from investors to gain a large userbase only to raise prices, break promises and significantly drive up profits. To prevent this Flame has made the acknowledgement that promising free great services is unrealistic and unsustainable. We won't be making the bold wishful claims you perhaps wanted to see, such as "We promise to never increase pricing on anything" or "We promise to never start a subscription service", because they would only eventually lead to potential disappointed. Instead, we have developed a profit vision with guidelines on what kind of things we will and will not monetize, and why. Here are a few of the basics:

1. Donations and third parties like merchandise
   The primary way, especially in the early stages, that we will be monetarily supported is through placed like Patreon and Ko-fi, as well as potential merchandise sales. This makes supporting us optional and an effort entirely from your end. This motivates us to make a better product so you are more likely to want to support it personally.


2. Communities pay, not individuals
   We plan to take money from the people who can best spare a buck already. That means corporations and large communities. By capping certain things like total membercounts on servers (given we balance these out to be high enough), we create the effect where any normal person will not care or ever run into the limitation, but larger communities will. Since larger places will either likely already generate the money for this option to be worth it, or see that Flame adds enough value to them that they will be willing to invest in it, this makes sense.


3. We are fans of our own product
   To further emphasize on how we don't want the individual to be the one that has to bury the burden of supporting the platform we deviced to put an artificial limitation on what we monetize. A general rule of thumb goes that we do not want to pay to use our own service in any way. That means that if a feature is good or important enough that we, as creators, would want to use it ourselves, we will not monetize it.


4. Ads are not inherently evil, bad ads are
   We stand for privacy and Flame will not sell any data to third parties, but that doesn't mean we can't analyze our data ourselves and use it to sustain the platform. Ads are certainly annoying, but well integrated ads are hardly noticable. And on chat platforms, they might actually be useful! Imagine communities that can pay to put themselves on recommendation lists in unintrusive ways.

When can we expect Flame?

We are a tiny team working in their spare time with just one developer for the whole task, so development will not be fast by any means. The intent is to release a usable beta before the end of 2021. We are currently looking at professionals who can fill positions such as Community Manager, Marketing Manager, Developers and Creative Artists. We will post a link to apply here soon.

Who is behind Flame and how can I trust them with my data?

Flame is being developed by Pascal (otherwise known as Mid online), a seasoned and experienced webdeveloper with experience in back-end infrastructure and user friendly design. You can find more about him here: https://poly.work/mid