Since Discord announced they’re going to help Petie T collect selfies of us all I’ve been working on a self hosted alternative mostly for my mates. I had five goals in mind when I started this:
- Text Channels
- Voice channels
- Screen Sharing
- End to end encrypted DMs
- Able to run on pretty much any web hosting
I’ve reached that point now and figured why not slap the GPL on it and send it out into the wild.
I’m sure there’ll be lots of bugs and I don’t think it will scale well. I never set out to make something that would grow into a behemoth that’s used for customer support and all sorts of shit.
The goal was to make something that covers that trifecta of text/voice/screensharing, without relying on P2P connectivity, and able to do it well for small groups of people.
There are more features I have in mind if it gets any interest:
- Rate limiting on backend requests
- Quasar app with the ability to add more than one server (the frontend is already built in Quasar and I started writing some code for it but I’m mostly building this for myself + friends where I host my own instance so I’ve not given it much attention)
So yeah, I’m not a professional dev, this is a hobby for me. Would be cool to see if anyone manages to get it running.
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Edit: Author says GenAI was not used for code, see below.
Original comment, observing signs of GenAI project:
What’s up with these brand-new “Discord alternatives” being cranked out en masse? Would be easier to contribute to XMPP or Matrix IMO.
Initial commit 14,203 files changed +2872320
AI? Or “i worked on this for 10 years and uploaded just now”? /s
Overabundance of emojis in description. Probably AI.
Would be cool to see if anyone manages to get it running.
Were you able to run it yourself? What.
Would be easier to contribute to XMPP or Matrix IMO.
Synapse is in the middle of a rebuild without much compatibility between the legacy and new builds, and it’s a pain in the dick to set up at the moment. I know, because I did it.
XMPP I haven’t tried to set up yet, but I imagine it to be similarly in-depth.
As to why not contribute: edit: not AI, they just don’t have the confidence in their own skills to contribute to anyone else’s project.
Now… why do the whole thing from scratch instead of forking? Great question. XMPP might just need a nice coat of paint, if it can handle voice and video and screen share; I haven’t come away with great impressions of matrix/synapse.
Like I said, I’m not a professional dev, this is a hobby. I fucked up my initial commit and included all the source for the Vue framework. That was me fixing my mistake. You’ll find a few more of those in there. If you actually look at the commit instead of just knee jerking you can see for yourself what happened.
To be honest, I’ve run matrix, it’s an absolute headache and to get voice and video is even worse. I don’t really care about federation, I’ve been pretty clear in what this project is.
I used Claude to give me a template for GitHub and generate the logo/favicon because I suck at all things creative. It’s open source, if someone wants to make me some images and rewrite the readme then crack on. The actual meat and bones of the project, the code, is all written by me, a real human.
Yes, I have run this myself, it works quite well. Apologies for trying to be a bit candid.
Appreciate the feedback.
These other responses are annoying. This looks really cool, and I hope that it works well for you and your friends! We definitely need good discord alternatives ASAP, and more options are better imo.
One cool feature would be some sort of official support for interop/bridging to other services. That might help to boost adoption and would make the “why not just contribute to Y” people be quiet.
Heh, I’ve been around a while. I expect people to pick it apart so they can get that kick out of being right or whatever.
It does what I need, thought other people might have found a use for it. I’m always happy for constructive criticism on my code or feature suggestions but people crying because I used Claude to give me a template for the readme can kick stones.
I’m sort of reluctant to add bridging mechanics for a couple of reasons. I don’t think my coding ability is up to it and it’s not something I’m really interested in or a goal for the project. I set out to make something that can be spun up pretty quickly for a group of people to have voice/text/screenshare when gaming. I never intended for it to be federated or hook into all sorts of services, just a self contained service for mostly private comms that doesn’t report back all your activity to Palantir or advertisers.
I expect people to pick it apart so they can get that kick out of being right or whatever.
This blasé attitude towards legitimate genAI concerns is only further concerning to me. Like the name and like the goal, but I don’t think I’ll be using it or contributing. Best of luck.
Appreciate the feedback, but if I’m going to be quoted, also me:
The actual meat and bones of the project, the code, is all written by me, a real human.
Let’s call a spade a spade here. It was not a legitimate GenAI concern. I considered rebasing the repo after I realised my mistake but I honestly thought no one would care, or the people that would care enough to look at commit histories would know enough about what they are looking at to realise what I did.
What OP did was look at the commit history, not understand it and then accuse me of being AI. So no, that is not in good faith.
I think there was a miscommunication and that after all I’ve seen, funnily enough, you seem more concerned than the original commenter about “being right or whatever”.
And you also did admit that you used genAI for some aspects, so the original commenter was not completely wrong. Some of us do not only care about the code.
There is a reason I am concerned about “being right”. This is a project I’ve worked pretty much non stop on for about a month, have written every piece of code myself. This is a public forum and the first time I’ve put my repo out there. To have the very first response be a dismissal that the literal hundreds of hours I’ve put it into it is just AI is not only insulting, it also makes it difficult for me to get valid feedback as people won’t read past that first comment and actually look at what I’ve made.
Sorry but I won’t roll over and take it when my hard work is dismissed because I used AI to generate the GitHub readme template. That is absurd.
Should have been a matrix client instead off réinventent the wheel everytime, damn im tired of those discord alternatives that probably have no future…
Read my post history here for why I think matrix is a bag of crap. 😅
Just use signal + matrix.
It’s better if we find a way to get people off discord into another platform than just cranking out new platforms.
Problem: There are 13 incompatible chat platforms
Solution: Combine use cases into a single chat platform
Problem: There are 14 incompatible chat platforms.
I’m sure there’ll be lots of bugs and I don’t think it will scale well.
The lack of scaling and even more critically, lack of federation, unfortunately makes this not a viable alternative, at least not for Discord as it is used today. As a smaller self-hosted option that is just for use between a friend group, it’d probably be fine. It just won’t be able to replace the exact use-case of Discord, such as allowing for easily bringing new randos you meet into a call without them having to sign up to your specific server.
The Discord-alternative landscape is filled with people vying to take its place, but I think we would be better served rallying behind Movim and XMPP, IMHO. Or Fluxer, if they eventually can enable federation.
