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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We need more institutional support to get to the level where this can be our focus. But in the meanwhile, if you're an individual and you do want to help @spritely advance, you can donate here: https://spritely.institute/donate/
This turned into a huge-ass thread between going to sleep and going to the dentist.
To everyone who's saying "Matrix!" and "XMPP!" those are great ecosystems that should keep moving forward and we should simultaneously support.
I'd like to reframe what we're interested in doing, and in a good position to do. I have to get through some things in my day first tho.
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@strypey @Kadin2048 @kitkat @polyfloyd @cwebber @spritely I don't follow matrix protocol development very closely so I wasn't familiar with all of these. my main issue is the lack of capability security in the auth layer. that's hard to retrofit and it effects everything on top. I don't want to build on something that has gone all-in on oauth2 with openid connect.
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@strypey @Kadin2048 @kitkat @polyfloyd @cwebber @spritely I don't follow matrix protocol development very closely so I wasn't familiar with all of these. my main issue is the lack of capability security in the auth layer. that's hard to retrofit and it effects everything on top. I don't want to build on something that has gone all-in on oauth2 with openid connect.
@strypey @Kadin2048 @kitkat @polyfloyd @cwebber @spritely that said, of all the available options out there *right now*, matrix is the best, imo.
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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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This turned into a huge-ass thread between going to sleep and going to the dentist.
To everyone who's saying "Matrix!" and "XMPP!" those are great ecosystems that should keep moving forward and we should simultaneously support.
I'd like to reframe what we're interested in doing, and in a good position to do. I have to get through some things in my day first tho.
Okay, here's my followup. What did I mean by "build a replacement for Discord"? That's shorthand, because to be honest, Discord is *a lot of things* because it has a lot of resources behind it. And of course, people have their own preferred directions, especially in XMPP and Matrix, and I think those efforts are worthwhile. But I'm talking about some near-future threats-and-opportunities, so let me explain what we want to, and ought to, build.
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Okay, here's my followup. What did I mean by "build a replacement for Discord"? That's shorthand, because to be honest, Discord is *a lot of things* because it has a lot of resources behind it. And of course, people have their own preferred directions, especially in XMPP and Matrix, and I think those efforts are worthwhile. But I'm talking about some near-future threats-and-opportunities, so let me explain what we want to, and ought to, build.
So I will detail in this thread, and yes, this will be a Classic Christine Thread (TM), what I mean. The things we would *like* to do, at a high level:
- Get "moderated chatroom with no center" tech in the hands of users
- Which also includes direct file sharing
- Advance Spritely's core tech in the process. There's nothing like a real world use case with real users to push forward your system
- Advancing that tooling also means opening up some things that you can't do anywhere elseWhat does that mean? Read on! Let's go!
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So I will detail in this thread, and yes, this will be a Classic Christine Thread (TM), what I mean. The things we would *like* to do, at a high level:
- Get "moderated chatroom with no center" tech in the hands of users
- Which also includes direct file sharing
- Advance Spritely's core tech in the process. There's nothing like a real world use case with real users to push forward your system
- Advancing that tooling also means opening up some things that you can't do anywhere elseWhat does that mean? Read on! Let's go!
There's a lot of things that the XMPP and Matrix ecosystems provide. XMPP has probably the widest amount of implementations out there, and the best written documentation and specifications for those specs. This is great! But the end-to-end encryption story isn't good, and there's still a center to each room. But it's also been around for a long time and there are a lot of wonderful things to the XMPP ecosystem, including a variety of lovely clients and servers!
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There's a lot of things that the XMPP and Matrix ecosystems provide. XMPP has probably the widest amount of implementations out there, and the best written documentation and specifications for those specs. This is great! But the end-to-end encryption story isn't good, and there's still a center to each room. But it's also been around for a long time and there are a lot of wonderful things to the XMPP ecosystem, including a variety of lovely clients and servers!
Matrix provides federation and end-to-end encryption. It has a Iot of quirks, as any user can tell you. But it's also pretty well developed for what it is and can do many things, including many things that aren't near term on our agenda at all, such as video and audio calls. That's worth highlighting and celebrating! And if you want to recommend someone something to replace Discord, Matrix is probably the best option... it's what I personally recommend, at this time.
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Matrix provides federation and end-to-end encryption. It has a Iot of quirks, as any user can tell you. But it's also pretty well developed for what it is and can do many things, including many things that aren't near term on our agenda at all, such as video and audio calls. That's worth highlighting and celebrating! And if you want to recommend someone something to replace Discord, Matrix is probably the best option... it's what I personally recommend, at this time.
I don't want to highlight these things to put them down. I don't want to focus on the negative space. I want to focus on the positive space, of opportunities less explored.
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I don't want to highlight these things to put them down. I don't want to focus on the negative space. I want to focus on the positive space, of opportunities less explored.
So first, let me focus on the user-facing thing I described before getting to the larger ecosystem. "Moderated chatroom with no center." What does that mean? And why is it politically important right now?
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So first, let me focus on the user-facing thing I described before getting to the larger ecosystem. "Moderated chatroom with no center." What does that mean? And why is it politically important right now?
Increasingly, we are seeing regulation and policies being driven by a coalition of two groups with differing goals: people with I will say, bad intentions to crack down on speech and communication between at risk groups, especially non-white and queer people. Who are, weirdly, teaming up with well meaning people who are upset at big tech for allowing terrible things to happen especially as engagement-oriented feeds have lead to radicalization of hate and other such things. And both of them are saying, "let's punish big tech!" Which like, great, I'm all for punishing big tech. Except...
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Increasingly, we are seeing regulation and policies being driven by a coalition of two groups with differing goals: people with I will say, bad intentions to crack down on speech and communication between at risk groups, especially non-white and queer people. Who are, weirdly, teaming up with well meaning people who are upset at big tech for allowing terrible things to happen especially as engagement-oriented feeds have lead to radicalization of hate and other such things. And both of them are saying, "let's punish big tech!" Which like, great, I'm all for punishing big tech. Except...
Except, for the most part, they aren't doing it! Things like repealing Section 230 in the US won't punish big tech much at all, it'll make it so that big players dominate the ecosystem more because they are the only ones that can comply with it (a "regulatory moat") and in the process, they'll tamp down on content from more diverse groups (it's no coincidence a lot of these bills are being pushed for by fundamentalist anti-queer lobbying orgs.) And unfortunately, it may get a lot harder for smaller, community oriented and self-hosting groups to exist.
(Notably, even Matrix is recognizing this in their own blogpost about Discord stuff!) https://matrix.org/blog/2026/02/welcome-discord/
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Except, for the most part, they aren't doing it! Things like repealing Section 230 in the US won't punish big tech much at all, it'll make it so that big players dominate the ecosystem more because they are the only ones that can comply with it (a "regulatory moat") and in the process, they'll tamp down on content from more diverse groups (it's no coincidence a lot of these bills are being pushed for by fundamentalist anti-queer lobbying orgs.) And unfortunately, it may get a lot harder for smaller, community oriented and self-hosting groups to exist.
(Notably, even Matrix is recognizing this in their own blogpost about Discord stuff!) https://matrix.org/blog/2026/02/welcome-discord/
Similarly, activism right now is absolutely relying on end-to-end encryption; Signal is hugely important to activists today. But much queer community building actually still happens in places like Discord, and Signal is highly centralized, and let's be honest, "just host your own Matrix server" isn't an easy ask for most people.
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Similarly, activism right now is absolutely relying on end-to-end encryption; Signal is hugely important to activists today. But much queer community building actually still happens in places like Discord, and Signal is highly centralized, and let's be honest, "just host your own Matrix server" isn't an easy ask for most people.
I think our engineer @dthompson put together the right ideas here with our Brassica Chat demo: https://spritely.institute/news/composing-capability-security-and-conflict-free-replicated-data-types.html
This is a demo, but it's a demo you can try in your browser. It permits users to go offline and come online, it has a design for moderation, without anyone being the central host. Nobody is hosting it because everyone is; there's no logical center. And yet, unlike a Blockchain, information can be forgotten, you don't have to hold on to everything, there's no proof-of-whatever. (And it uses capability security on multiple layers, which is important, but we'll get to later.)
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I think our engineer @dthompson put together the right ideas here with our Brassica Chat demo: https://spritely.institute/news/composing-capability-security-and-conflict-free-replicated-data-types.html
This is a demo, but it's a demo you can try in your browser. It permits users to go offline and come online, it has a design for moderation, without anyone being the central host. Nobody is hosting it because everyone is; there's no logical center. And yet, unlike a Blockchain, information can be forgotten, you don't have to hold on to everything, there's no proof-of-whatever. (And it uses capability security on multiple layers, which is important, but we'll get to later.)
Furthermore, while there is a federated relay, that relay is (with the new E2EE work Jessica Tallon is working on) oblivious to what's happening. There's no server in charge of state. The logic of what's happening in the room is handled by the peers talking with each other directly. I think this is a solid design but all we have is a demo. Well, I'd like to make it not a demo. I want it to be something people can use.
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Furthermore, while there is a federated relay, that relay is (with the new E2EE work Jessica Tallon is working on) oblivious to what's happening. There's no server in charge of state. The logic of what's happening in the room is handled by the peers talking with each other directly. I think this is a solid design but all we have is a demo. Well, I'd like to make it not a demo. I want it to be something people can use.
So yes, today, I would recommend you use Matrix, and even initially, it may be something more useful for activist and queer communities and people interested in advancing this kind of ecosystem. I am glad we have other things in progress that I can recommend right now. But I am worried about where things are going socially, and trying to design for systems safer for that.
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So yes, today, I would recommend you use Matrix, and even initially, it may be something more useful for activist and queer communities and people interested in advancing this kind of ecosystem. I am glad we have other things in progress that I can recommend right now. But I am worried about where things are going socially, and trying to design for systems safer for that.
I mentioned "direct file sharing", that's an easy outgrowth of the design described above. Since we're dealing with message passing directly between peers, it's quite feasible. There's some more advanced things that can be done with content-addressed content, but that doesn't need to come in the initial versions of things.
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I mentioned "direct file sharing", that's an easy outgrowth of the design described above. Since we're dealing with message passing directly between peers, it's quite feasible. There's some more advanced things that can be done with content-addressed content, but that doesn't need to come in the initial versions of things.
Now I mentioned advancing Spritely's core tech. You may have seen that Spritely is very demo-oriented. But it's often a bit more than just a demo, we've shipped a bunch of games built on our tech so you can see things work, but that's also because a game is something more substantial that tends to push the limits of things and helps us stress that the core ideas are working, and working performantly, while demonstrating core ideas in a fun way. But an application that users use every day is a different matter. There's a lot of things you have to get right. And we've spent several years in the demos and games phase. It's time to start getting this stuff in users' hands. And that will improve the whole Spritely ecosystem too, so that you can also use Spritely's tech to do other wild things.
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Now I mentioned advancing Spritely's core tech. You may have seen that Spritely is very demo-oriented. But it's often a bit more than just a demo, we've shipped a bunch of games built on our tech so you can see things work, but that's also because a game is something more substantial that tends to push the limits of things and helps us stress that the core ideas are working, and working performantly, while demonstrating core ideas in a fun way. But an application that users use every day is a different matter. There's a lot of things you have to get right. And we've spent several years in the demos and games phase. It's time to start getting this stuff in users' hands. And that will improve the whole Spritely ecosystem too, so that you can also use Spritely's tech to do other wild things.
What kinds of wild things? Well really, why shouldn't all software be social and collaborative? But I am also talking about real, performance-critical things. And yes, returning to games again, but take a look at this game demo we put together Goblinville: https://spritely.institute/news/goblinville-a-spring-lisp-game-jam-2025-retrospective.html
That's cool and realtime and honestly is something you can't do on top of ActivityPub for instance; the latency requirements are too tight. This is a good example of the use of our protocol OCapN.
