wewe - Making Group Messages Public to the World

A few weeks ago, I shared my Transparent Startup Experiment on several forums and created a WeChat group for discussion.

Unexpectedly, over 500 people joined, and many interesting discussions emerged in the group.

Unfortunately, these discussions remained trapped in WeChat, only visible to those who joined the group. New members couldn’t see old messages, and for repeated questions, I sometimes had to answer multiple times.

I kept thinking - could I make these messages public for everyone to see? This way, interested people could conveniently view chat history and search for content of interest. If I built such a tool, it would also be meaningful for other groups wishing to publicize their messages.

I had previous experience with wechaty, so I got to work and built the MVP! After several weeks of design and development, I created wewe

Value Provided by wewe

• Records group chat information in one place, visible to non-group members
• Searchable by search engines
• Topic extraction for easy browsing and searching
• Chat content analysis (unfinished)
• Supports various group chat tools (currently supports WeChat groups and Slack groups, with plans to support Telegram/Gitter and other mainstream group chat tools)

Technical Implementation

wewe is an open-source project. For specific implementation details, see GitHub

The WeChat portion is based on wechaty. The basic principle is to launch a browser, log into web WeChat, then store received messages in a database.

How to Join

Requirements

1. Inform all group members that group messages will be publicly available on the internet
2. If it’s a WeChat group, designate a volunteer willing to collect topics (Slack doesn’t need this, it has built-in threads feature)

How to Join

• WeChat: Add timbot as a friend, with remark “join wewe”, then invite the bot into the group chat. If the content is suitable for publicity, I’ll start collecting
• Slack: Join the t9t.io slack group

FAQ

• Privacy: Maximizing privacy protection for group members, so messages are anonymous by default. However, for members willing to make their identity public, we also support displaying nicknames, brief self-introductions, links, etc. e.g. t9t group members https://wewe.t9t.io/chat/t9t.io%20community/members
• Pricing: wewe is still in development, and because the website uses serverless development (aws lambda & dynamodb & s3), maintenance and server costs are relatively low. Free service provided for the first 30 groups to join. The charging model afterwards is still under consideration

wewe is still a project under development. Feel free to comment and share your thoughts on it

Author: @timqian Building transparent products at t9t.io

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本文也有中文版本。