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.
You must log in or # to comment.
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.
Problem: There are 13 incompatible chat platforms
Solution: Combine use cases into a single chat platform
Problem: There are 14 incompatible chat platforms.
Yet Another Discord Alternative would be a better name than Harmony.
Has the problem of having Discord in the name. Also Harmony is pretty much opposite of Discord. Good name.
It was originally going to be Entropy (there might actually still be references to that in the code) but 3 seconds in Google turned up a decentralised messaging app called that so went with a name change. Now it just sounds like an early internet dating site.
A little bit, but it’s probably okay. Hope it takes off!
That’s true, maybe “Yet Another Discourse Alternative”? Discussion Alternative? I just like the idea of a chat platform whose acronym is YADA.
I’d you just call it YADA without it being an acronym…
I thought the same right after I posted. Damnit. :(
IME, code projects either die or live long enough that you think of a better name for them long after a name change becomes not worth the effort. Naming things is hard 🤷♂️
They could’ve shortened it to YADA YADA.
No for real love this name, just call it YADA, though you might get a cease and desist from seinfield.
At work one of our application names is “just another generator of…” and we just call it jag
deleted by creator
eh while i appreciate this Project i do also think that contributing to Software like Matrix or XMPP would be better as theyre actually used in Production and Companies :P
I’m with you, I love Matrix as a concept but the experience of actually running it was a major headache for me.
I’d love to contribute to those projects but anyone that’s read through my repo for this will see I’m not that good. It took me a long ass time to figure out end to end encryption and those projects are built on it. 😅
I also feel like they fit a different niche, at least matrix does, I’m not too familiar with XMPP. I’ve said in other replies, I’m not looking to make something that’s infinitely scalable or federates with other services, just a relatively simple chat app that someone can have running for their group of gamer friends. If it can do text/voice/screen share with minimal setup/fuss/external dependencies then I’m a happy boy. I kinda had this idea in my head that I’d like to get it to the point where you can upload a tar.gz to cheapo web hosting, untar, follow the setup wizard and have comms ready to go without having to mess around in config files and what not.
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.
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.
I like fluxer.app
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters CSAM Child Sexual Abuse Material SSO Single Sign-On XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (‘Jabber’) for open instant messaging
[Thread #170 for this comm, first seen 16th Mar 2026, 13:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
