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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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.
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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.
Which, speaking of, there are multiple OCapN implementations in progress now that are reaching maturity, not just Spritely's! One in Javascript, and one in Dart, are both getting more serious. And that's due to the hard work of those people working on them. They get the primary credit.
(Shout outs to @ridley and @kumavis and @kriskowal and @tsyesika for all of their implementation work on OCapN! And me
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Which, speaking of, there are multiple OCapN implementations in progress now that are reaching maturity, not just Spritely's! One in Javascript, and one in Dart, are both getting more serious. And that's due to the hard work of those people working on them. They get the primary credit.
(Shout outs to @ridley and @kumavis and @kriskowal and @tsyesika for all of their implementation work on OCapN! And me
)But it also required a lot of work from Spritely, which did the initial work of building out the test suite and specs and etc. And it's no coincidence that the design of OCapN built on a rich capability security history, but this particular version started with Goblins' OCapN originally done by me, and then picked up and maintained and turned into specs and a test suite by @tsyesika . And hey, you might notice that Jessica and I... we also worked on ActivityPub! We have a history of getting things out there to people, laying foundations that other people can build upon.
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But it also required a lot of work from Spritely, which did the initial work of building out the test suite and specs and etc. And it's no coincidence that the design of OCapN built on a rich capability security history, but this particular version started with Goblins' OCapN originally done by me, and then picked up and maintained and turned into specs and a test suite by @tsyesika . And hey, you might notice that Jessica and I... we also worked on ActivityPub! We have a history of getting things out there to people, laying foundations that other people can build upon.
Now some of these ideas do resemble tech you'll see in other places, but a lot of it is happening in other areas that are closer to the periphery. @gwil and @expede are doing great work, for instance, in advancing work in very similar areas to Spritely. I consider this work not competitive, but complementary: we need multiple groups trying things out and collaborating right now!
But if you're saying "well why not just work on Matrix" or "why not add federation to Zulip" or "XMPP has been around forever" great awesome lovely fantastic those projects deserve support! But again, none of those are facing the particular near-term threats and opportunities I am talking about here. There are some projects nearby that are, and we *are* also working on convergence in some places (see OCapN), but we are talking about some ways of addressing needs that are, in the sense of getting in users' hands, fairly new.
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Now some of these ideas do resemble tech you'll see in other places, but a lot of it is happening in other areas that are closer to the periphery. @gwil and @expede are doing great work, for instance, in advancing work in very similar areas to Spritely. I consider this work not competitive, but complementary: we need multiple groups trying things out and collaborating right now!
But if you're saying "well why not just work on Matrix" or "why not add federation to Zulip" or "XMPP has been around forever" great awesome lovely fantastic those projects deserve support! But again, none of those are facing the particular near-term threats and opportunities I am talking about here. There are some projects nearby that are, and we *are* also working on convergence in some places (see OCapN), but we are talking about some ways of addressing needs that are, in the sense of getting in users' hands, fairly new.
We're trying to build the foundations for the future here. That's what I want to build. But it's time to bring the future a bit closer to the present. So maybe we can make that happen together.
Hope that explains things. There's a lot more that can be said, and a lot more that should be said. But I hope it's clearer what I mean, and the direction we're pushing on.
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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!
@cwebber Jumping ahead - quite a bit - based on your recent "How to Level Up the Fediverse" talk, where you had mentioned the idea of, to describe it in brief, "web applications that contain multiple applications", such as online communities that contain games, etc.
I assume this is relevant to where you're going with a Discord alternative, which is actually a large number of interacting features, really?
I can see why this kind of project might be an excellent test bed for popularizing this.
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@cwebber Jumping ahead - quite a bit - based on your recent "How to Level Up the Fediverse" talk, where you had mentioned the idea of, to describe it in brief, "web applications that contain multiple applications", such as online communities that contain games, etc.
I assume this is relevant to where you're going with a Discord alternative, which is actually a large number of interacting features, really?
I can see why this kind of project might be an excellent test bed for popularizing this.
@KraftTea Yup, you've got it. I've limited how much I talked about extensibility and what the platform we're building allows, but you got it exactly.
We're talking about abilities that you don't see on contemporary social networks, proprietary or free, but it will take time to make that vision fully realized, so I am being careful about what I say.
