What does Pusher do exactly?

Appreciate all the feedback above. For me https://zetpush.com/ has done the trick. I can use segmentation with this. I can also filter my subscribers.
Mr. #Demon - with zetpush you can deal with your special members' group.

Thanks.

Is there a way to incorporate chrome pop up notifications?

MikeJones I was going to make an extension for this, but never quite got around to it. I might eventually, but for anyone wanting to, check out my github profile (PartialDevAdmin) and look at the popup-notify program, it has some example alert code that you could use if you were wanting to implement this

Frink This would be a sweet extension. Totally support you when you have time lol

flame care to list the open source alternative which can be used instead of pusher?

draeron slanger is a ruby based server, not sure it is still maintained and active. You can find it on github.
You can also use kyrne/websocket which only costs a few bucks no matter how much traffic you need because you can install it. It's a premium extension.

draeron I'd recommend checking out this thread: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8395900/open-source-alternatives-to-pusher. There's quite a few options, some of which seem to be compatible with clients using Pusher (ie flarum's bundled pusher system might work). Haven't tested that though. You might also be interested in the premium websockets extension, which does all the setup for you: https://discuss.flarum.org/d/23473-websockets-locally-hosted-alternative-for-pusher/12.

i've been trying to use this project which is pretty much exactly what i was looking for https://github.com/dimiro1/ipe.

Sadly the js client library used in the extension doesn't seems to support have a custom URL for the pusher server. I'm still investigating...

draeron Did you ever manage to self-host this? I guess modifying the pusher service url in the Flarum extension should not be that difficult?

Sadly the project you linked seems unmaintained also.

There is a newer fork of Slanger here: https://github.com/liberateinc/slanger

And a very WIP project that seems to be only for local deployments: https://github.com/thoersch/local-pusher

Anyways would be cool if anyone here could share their experience with helf-hosting a pusher-like service for use with Flarum.

This also looks like something that could easily replace pusher:
https://github.com/beyondcode/laravel-websockets

poVoq that is exactly the package that kyrne uses on his extension.

poVoq Anyways would be cool if anyone here could share their experience with helf-hosting a pusher-like service for use with Flarum.

For Blomstra I decided to create a custom implementation (blomstra/realtime) which is much more thinned down to the basic needs of a Flarum forum. We haven't decided yet on how to publish this (most likely premium or paid support). But this shows that "rolling your own" is certainly possible.

We are successfully using our realtime extension on our client websites already, it seems to scale perfectly.