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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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.
