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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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.
I think these smaller scale, single instance Discord alternatives are honestly the way to go for a lot of people. I don’t use Discord at all in my personal life, but my family use WhatsApp/Telegram/etc a lot and I see these more as an alternative to those rather than Discord specifically. While I like the idea of NC Talk, it’s seems like a real pain to setup if you didn’t start out using the Nextcloud AIO container like me. I don’t want to link to other instances or have bridging, I want something I can set and forget on a family member’s phone and know their stuff isn’t going to be fed into alphamicrobook’s combine-data-harvester or that they’re going to fall victim to a pig-butchering scam. This looks like a great solution, even if it’s a little rough around the edges.
Idk, a lot of people aren’t really equipped to be the webmaster for their friends and family. Centralization is part of the appeal. Its much easier to talk to friends when I dont need to convince them to make a new account somewhere.
The commit history is 1 day.
Which is incredibly suspicious.
It’s a new project that I’ve been working on locally. My code backups are handled locally (this is /c/selfhosted right?) so I’ve not had a reason to commit anything to GitHub until I was ready to let other people have a crack at it.
My Github account is 14 years old and has previous projects on it with 40+ stars. I have been actively replying as much as I can in this thread and the project is entirely open source, feel free to review the code and let me know if you find anything suspicious in there.
Makes sense. I appreciate your replies
Would I be able to sign into multiple servers simultaneously? In case I have 2 friends hosting this on their own separate servers?
I care about that more than federation.
This will probably be the first update I release. I’ve pre emptively built the front end in Quasar and there’s even some bits of commented out code in there from where I started looking at storing authentication data per server. The plan as I see it, and I think this makes sense, is to have the web app based front-end be for people that want to run their own contained instance of both the API and front-end but then also have a Quasar desktop based app that has server switching built in. This then allows the server owner to just run the API if they want and let the user worry about how they connect.
It hasn’t been a priority for me at the moment because I’m literally the only person running a server. 😅
Now that it’s out in the wild, my next focus will be on the multi server side of things and making the text channels a bit more functional than just plaintext.
Sounds awesome! No rush, I’m a big believer in taking the time to do it right, not twice.
Just wanted to let you know that I find value in that + feel like it could help adoption especially in the self hosting community.
