I’ve been thinking a lot about the direction of OnlineVibes.

The roots of this project go back much further than the current codebase.

In the mid-to-late 90s, I remember using ICQ and being genuinely amazed by the idea of real-time online presence. Not just messaging, but knowing who was online, who was available, and being able to instantly connect.

Then, in the early 2000s, I discovered Jabber/XMPP — and free Jabber clients — and it completely changed how I thought about communication software. Open protocols. Federated identity. Real-time messaging. Presence as a first-class concept.

There was another influence too.

In my early twenties, my friends and I used to do a kind of “YouTube DJing” at parties in the London underground music scene. Someone would put on a track, someone else would jump in with a related one, then someone would take it somewhere completely unexpected. It was collaborative, chaotic, social, and very human.

That experience has stayed with me.

Part of the drive behind OnlineVibes has always been to bring some of that feeling online: shared rooms, presence, music, conversation, discovery, and a more peer-to-peer sense of participation.

There was also an earlier version of the OnlineVibes idea around 2011: an online marketplace for DIY musicians, bands, and independent labels. At the time, I was interested in how small music communities could use the web not just to promote themselves, but to connect more directly — sharing music, building scenes, finding collaborators, and creating lightweight alternatives to the increasingly centralised platforms that were starting to dominate online culture.

That idea never fully became the thing I imagined, but it left an important trace. OnlineVibes has always had this tension inside it: part communication tool, part community space, part music discovery platform, part experiment in giving people more direct ways to gather online.

Around 2016, I started properly experimenting with ejabberd. Since then, OnlineVibes has gone through many iterations: different deployment approaches, different ideas about user experience, different levels of complexity, and plenty of false starts.

The biggest change recently has been simplification.

Now that the stack is Docker-based, the project is much easier to run, reason about, deploy, and evolve. What once felt like a fairly niche personal experiment is starting to look like something much more practical.

That creates an interesting fork in the road.

On one hand, OnlineVibes feels like an ideal candidate for a new Empathy / elib-base / bdcli quickstart template — alongside projects like elib-blog, elib-cms, elib-acl, and others. A ready-made foundation for building real-time chat, presence, and community applications.

On the other hand, there may also be commercial potential here.

Could OnlineVibes become a closed-source platform?

Could it become a licensable piece of infrastructure for building AI-enabled chat room and presence software?

Could it sit somewhere between those two worlds — with an open developer template at the base, and commercial products or services built on top?

That’s the part I’m still working through.

The hardest challenge right now is not really technical. It is getting people to actually use it early enough to help shape it. Some close friends and family have been enthusiastic, but turning that enthusiasm into regular usage and useful feedback is difficult.

That puts the project in a strange place: technically much more mature than before, but still looking for the right initial user loop.

Still, I think that is a good problem to have.

After years of experimenting with XMPP, ejabberd, Docker, Empathy, deployment automation, and the social mechanics of online presence, OnlineVibes is becoming less of a vague idea and more of a reusable foundation.

Maybe it becomes a community template.

Maybe it becomes a commercial platform.

Maybe it becomes a licensable technology layer for AI-enabled chat and presence software.

Or maybe it becomes some combination of all three.

Either way, it still comes back to the same idea that first grabbed me years ago: being online should feel alive.