once-campfire

For what it's worth, I have Community Notes access on Twitter, and the below is a currently-hidden note for the post which in the "validation gathering" phase: > The shown benchmarks use non-equivalent implementations: Elixir routes all DB queries through a single GenServer with Redis for jobs (retained from Rails), while Rust uses in-process queues, omits CSRF tags/fields, and applies other caching changes. https://x.com/zachsdaniel1/status/2106820451557073175 https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire-elixir/blob/main/l... https://raw.githubusercontent.com/basecamp/once-campfire-eli... https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire-rust https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire

It used to be a paid product, now it's free. There's a clear link to the source code on GitHub [1], so you don't need to go through the "checkout". [1]: https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire

I think Campfire used to have a one-time cost of $200 or something per domain, when did it switch to being free? Edit: found it, it was in August 2025 https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire/commit/df76a227dc1...

Small Bets chat [0], an extensively modified fork of Campfire by 37signals (the group chat app in Ruby on Rails), is now FOSS, as announced at [1]. Changes added to the Small Bets edition of Campfire chat include those on this list: https://github.com/antiwork/smallbets/blob/master/campfire-m... Notably, the rooms lists appears different in Small Bets chat vs. in the original Campfire, with the "star to pin favorite rooms" mechanism in the Small Bets fork. Previously, 37signals recently changed the license of Campfire to be FOSS: https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire [0] https://github.com/antiwork/smallbets/ [1] https://x.com/dvassallo/status/1970489062185185497

You aren’t wrong. Up until a couple of weeks ago it was $299. Once. Forever. That was the whole idea. Very cool that they open sourced it. MIT license too. https://x.com/dhh/status/1963675999012552970 https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire

That's an outdated license web page dated 2024, see "Copyright © 2024" at the bottom. The code was made free in 2025 per X post dated Sep 12, 2025 by Jason Fried [0], screenshot available [1]. A quote from Fried's tweet: Campfire...it's now 100% free...and open source. Here's a quote from https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire/blob/main/MIT-LICE... Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction... [0] https://x.com/jasonfried/status/1966559597117964560 [1] https://files.catbox.moe/98t9vx.png

Maybe a good time to remind people that 37 Signals made their standalone chat product, Campfire, open source and free earlier this month: - https://once.com/campfire - https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire I imagine the response for many of these communities will be "Let's migrate to Discord" - but I think many of them should consider hosting something themselves. They will be in complete control and something like Campfire is very low effort to manage and very cheap to host. Discord is also a VC-backed company that needs to make money, and there's nothing stopping them from charging communities there as well.

Interesting because the repo only lists a MIT license, with no mention of those requirements. IANAL but those license terms don't seem to be anywhere in the software repository. https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire

I think what they did is slimy as hell, but it's hard to side with anyone using Discord, Slack, et al for doing community based support and building a knowledge base. This was not an issue in the era of forums, that supposedly were replaced with SaaS closed communities because of spam... Fyi, Campfire is open source now: https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire

Or better this: https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire

I think using importmaps might be why it is restricted (see https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire/blob/main/app/cont...) to some browser versions. One can try to migrate it to vitejs for example or any other JS/CSS build tool and it might have good chances maybe to work on older browsers.

I got a kick out of seemingly server-side browser blocking https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire/blob/eecdb29332527... without one iota of "but, why?"

Reading through some controllers and models, haven't encountered a single code comment yet, just chiselled-out ruby. Arbitrary examples: https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire/blob/main/app/cont... https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire/blob/main/app/cont... https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire/blob/main/app/mode...