If you're interested in funding or helping us find funding for a Discord replacement that's federated and end-to-end encrypted, we're interested in implementing that at @spritely ... we even had been talking about that being our big focus for 2026.
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@wcbdata
What needs to be fixed about Zulip? I'm curious, as I'm very intrigued by how it works, and I think it could work very well for organizing conversations.@viq Sorry about that - replied to a similar question further up the thread (as an accidental case in point, I suppose!)
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@ekaitz_zarraga @cwebber @spritely Yeah, it has some quirks but is relatively intuitive for being so robust.
I was part of a 100+ person writing group that migrated from (private) Reddit chat (which sucked). There was the usual grumbling but even the very non-technical folks figured it out pretty quickly.
(They do not plan to move again and I can't think of what to even suggest... )
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@viq Sorry about that - replied to a similar question further up the thread (as an accidental case in point, I suppose!)
@wcbdata
”see answer over there" is a perfectly reasonable response
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@SprocketClown @tim @cwebber @spritely Gotta agree, as someone who has set up a Matrix server, the UX has been and still is a disaster (give them 10 years and it’ll still look like XMPP), and they have literal “pro” versions of Matrix that are NOT the same source as community and are hosted by them.
Discord isn’t a good company, but they made a functional UX and understood that simple is intuitive.
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If you're interested in funding or helping us find funding for a Discord replacement that's federated and end-to-end encrypted, we're interested in implementing that at @spritely ... we even had been talking about that being our big focus for 2026.
We have the skills and the underlying tech to pull this off. What we need right now is resources. Funding for open source nonprofits like ours really fell apart in 2025. If you think you know how to help, feel free to reach out.
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@polyfloyd @cwebber @spritely I took a quick look and I don't see anything that mentions Stoat having federation or any other decentralized features. Commet probably has that due to being built on Matrix. Other than that, they all seem centralized but self-hostable with the exception of Root which afaict is proprietary SaaS.
@dthompson @polyfloyd @cwebber @spritely That’s because Stoat doesn’t have decentralized federated features. In fact, if you want to connect to another server, you have to compile the client and distribute it.
Saying this, Federation of chat channels might be unnecessary tech. What you need is a client that easily connects to multiple servers (“communities”) simultaneously with a single login, of which that login server can be federated.
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Funding-infrastructurally: one thing I'd like to see is some kind of mechanism where non-wealthy individuals with a little cash to spare can pledge $support if some corporate sponsor pulls out, especially if it's for questionable reasons.
(Just a thought.)
(Hey have you heard of ActivityPub, maybe that would be good for this.) -
@SprocketClown @tim @cwebber @spritely Gotta agree, as someone who has set up a Matrix server, the UX has been and still is a disaster (give them 10 years and it’ll still look like XMPP), and they have literal “pro” versions of Matrix that are NOT the same source as community and are hosted by them.
Discord isn’t a good company, but they made a functional UX and understood that simple is intuitive.
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@dthompson @polyfloyd @cwebber @spritely That’s because Stoat doesn’t have decentralized federated features. In fact, if you want to connect to another server, you have to compile the client and distribute it.
Saying this, Federation of chat channels might be unnecessary tech. What you need is a client that easily connects to multiple servers (“communities”) simultaneously with a single login, of which that login server can be federated.
@polyfloyd @cwebber @spritely @shanie yes, decentralized identity would resolve the issue of needing a separate account for each chat server, but I think the fediverse has shown the community-oriented server approach to be rather brittle. good enough for right now but not a model I want to replicate.
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@SprocketClown @tim @cwebber @spritely Stoat has a good UX but not decentralized in any way and their plans for that are not robust (see: “maybe one day”). It’s a “kick the Discord problem down the road a bit” solution. Perhaps that’s what we need with no real solution available right now.
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@polyfloyd @cwebber @spritely @shanie yes, decentralized identity would resolve the issue of needing a separate account for each chat server, but I think the fediverse has shown the community-oriented server approach to be rather brittle. good enough for right now but not a model I want to replicate.
@dthompson @polyfloyd @cwebber @spritely personally I find the decentralized nature of Mastodon to be quite robust, but that’s because I limit who can join my server so I don’t get overrun, in data bandwidth, storage, or moderation…
A feature that would be welcome and might alleviate your concerns is high availability so other servers can carry the load when one server fails or disappears, kind of like IRC.
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If you're interested in funding or helping us find funding for a Discord replacement that's federated and end-to-end encrypted, we're interested in implementing that at @spritely ... we even had been talking about that being our big focus for 2026.
We have the skills and the underlying tech to pull this off. What we need right now is resources. Funding for open source nonprofits like ours really fell apart in 2025. If you think you know how to help, feel free to reach out.
@cwebber @spritely if it can be made as simple to install and run as Mastodon, then I could see it being a great opportunity. I’m advocating for hyper local installs as a way around age verification. https://www.empathyforward.org/2025/12/community-based-fediverse-instances/
My own FOSS efforts are focused on making this easier to manage.
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@SprocketClown @tim @cwebber @spritely Stoat has a good UX but not decentralized in any way and their plans for that are not robust (see: “maybe one day”). It’s a “kick the Discord problem down the road a bit” solution. Perhaps that’s what we need with no real solution available right now.
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If you're interested in funding or helping us find funding for a Discord replacement that's federated and end-to-end encrypted, we're interested in implementing that at @spritely ... we even had been talking about that being our big focus for 2026.
We have the skills and the underlying tech to pull this off. What we need right now is resources. Funding for open source nonprofits like ours really fell apart in 2025. If you think you know how to help, feel free to reach out.
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@danvolchek @cwebber @spritely I found out about a reverse-engineered open-source clone of Discord just yesterday on a discussion about this on Lemmy. Fluxer. The screenshots make it look exactly like Discord, but I haven’t used it. It appears to be in beta: https://fluxer.app
Edit to add that as a Discord clone it’s probably not federated or end to end encrypted, so my post was more a reply to Dan instead of to Christine.
Edit 2: https://spacebar.chat is the reverse engineered one!
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@cwebber @spritely if it can be made as simple to install and run as Mastodon, then I could see it being a great opportunity. I’m advocating for hyper local installs as a way around age verification. https://www.empathyforward.org/2025/12/community-based-fediverse-instances/
My own FOSS efforts are focused on making this easier to manage.
@luggage Is that a real piece of graffiti art? If so, it's amazing.
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@dthompson @polyfloyd @cwebber @spritely That’s because Stoat doesn’t have decentralized federated features. In fact, if you want to connect to another server, you have to compile the client and distribute it.
Saying this, Federation of chat channels might be unnecessary tech. What you need is a client that easily connects to multiple servers (“communities”) simultaneously with a single login, of which that login server can be federated.
@shanie
Is there an audio-focused version of Loops that could do... something with ... Fedi...?
Long Covid eviscerated my brain. IDEK if this makes sense. (Also, depending whenever the UK strips VPNs, I may or may not be able to reply in mid-future.) @dthompson @polyfloyd @cwebber @spritely -
@polyfloyd @cwebber @spritely can you name one that is any good? I can't. matrix probably comes the closest but it has fundamental issues that would be hard to fix retroactively.
@dthompson However bad they are, all of them are literally better than one that doesn't exist at all. With the time left, which option makes more sense, from the standpoint of gaining a viable alternative in the shortest time? I say, pick the most promising or least-bad extant project, and warp-drive that into viailibity, however ugly it is coming out of the gate. You're either going to have to A-Team this, or accept using the thing you want to drop until you have the pretty thing you want.
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If you're interested in funding or helping us find funding for a Discord replacement that's federated and end-to-end encrypted, we're interested in implementing that at @spritely ... we even had been talking about that being our big focus for 2026.
We have the skills and the underlying tech to pull this off. What we need right now is resources. Funding for open source nonprofits like ours really fell apart in 2025. If you think you know how to help, feel free to reach out.
