"MazeChat" is an open-source chatting application built with "Maze", which utilizes its own realtime-messaging protocol and the Akeno backend.
This is a repo for the official frontend AND the backend.
You can create your own frontends using the client.js file.
Confused on what's frontend and what is backend? They work together, sort of.
Everything runs under Akeno, and as stated in /app.conf, the /js/backend.js is an API extension, which is all the backend that Maze needs. Its that simple, really.
How to run:
Get Akeno, then clone this repository, change to your domain (in app.conf) and add the local path to the "config" file in Akeno.
Then hot-reload/full-reload Akeno and you are done.
If you live in the future, you can also do akeno get the-lstv/maze-chat and be done with it.
I have no direct (self-hostable) comparsion, but I think Maze is pretty fast, and about to get much faster.
For example - compared to Discord:
(Both tested in the same conditions, caching disabled, NOT including images, NOT including preflights, fresh Chrome instances, and no I did not test on localhost)
| Platform | Load time | No. of requests | Size of resources | Consumed RAM | Scripting time | Rendering time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Discord | 7.6 seconds | 121 | 25.3MB | 110MB | 1904ms | 178ms |
| Maze | 0.7 seconds | 21 | 717kB (0.7MB) | 3MB | 49ms | 35ms |
... And as you can see, Maze singlehandedly wins every benchmark. Especially the memory consumption and scripting time - Discord consumes 107MB more than Maze!
This is because Maze is much, much more lightweight than Discord, and is also written from scratch, using vanilla technologies, instead of Discord's vast amount of bloat.
Maze is also more optimized and efficient, built for a purpose, and does not re-send data that it does not need.
Instead of using JSON for its WebSocket communication, Maze uses a special binary encoding which can be as tiny as 18 bytes for a received message! How much does Discord need for the same? 927 bytes(!!), somehow
uhh ill add it leter