Mastodawn

Christine Lemmer-Webber

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.

Christine Lemmer-Webber Feb 11

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/

Support Spritely! — Spritely Institute

Christine Lemmer-Webber Feb 12

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.

Christine Lemmer-Webber Feb 12

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.

Christine Lemmer-Webber Feb 12

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 else

What does that mean? Read on! Let's go!

Christine Lemmer-Webber Feb 12

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!

Christine Lemmer-Webber Feb 12

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.

Christine Lemmer-Webber Feb 12

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.

Christine Lemmer-Webber Feb 12

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?

Christine Lemmer-Webber Feb 12

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...

Christine Lemmer-Webber Feb 12

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/

Welcoming Discord users amidst the challenge of Age Verification

Matrix, the open protocol for secure decentralised communications

Christine Lemmer-Webber Feb 12

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.

Christine Lemmer-Webber Feb 12

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.)

Composing capability security and conflict-free replicated data types — Spritely Institute

Christine Lemmer-Webber Feb 12

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.

Christine Lemmer-Webber Feb 12

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.

Christine Lemmer-Webber Feb 12

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.

Christine Lemmer-Webber Feb 12

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.

Christine Lemmer-Webber Feb 12

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.

Goblinville: A Spring Lisp Game Jam 2025 retrospective — Spritely Institute

Christine Lemmer-Webber Feb 12

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 ;P )

Christine Lemmer-Webber Feb 12

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.

Christine Lemmer-Webber Feb 12

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.

Karl Heinz Häsliprinz Feb 13

@cwebber once you can file share, you can also voice and video message. Low lag calls are overrated anyway...

Tea time.Feb 12

@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.

Christine Lemmer-Webber Feb 12

@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.

@cwebber > - Which also includes direct file sharing

One of those parts where XMPP fails is that filesharing is in plaintext.

A mistake that must not be repeated.

@cwebber
I am tapping the sign.
The sign says: gamers are a core demographic of discord, and low friction, low latency, and high quality voicechat rooms are a necessity for them

Luigi.exe (Dragonheart System)Feb 15

I've been on Discord since early 2017, longer than my systemmates have existed, and I fully agree with this. If any of these platforms want to genuinely compete with Discord, they must have good voice calls and screensharing. It's a requirement.

How my friends and I hang out is by voice chatting and often screensharing; it's the most common way we spend time together and that's how we've done it for years. I imagine many other Discord users echo that sentiment.

And as we all know, voice calls and screensharing require low latency and high performance, else people will find something else. It sucks, but most people do not care about or even know about things like federated social networks. They just want a product that fulfills their needs and does it well without screwing them over.

KryptykPhysh Feb 11

@cwebber @spritely How much funding is significant and how much is too little?

Dr. Sobek Feb 11

@KryptykPhysh @cwebber @spritely Same question. I might consider forking a little bit of money (on the magnitude of 5€/month), but I'm no big fish and my pockets are already a bit drained.

Bill Woodcock Feb 11

@cwebber @spritely

Isn't that XMPP?

@woody
> Isn't that XMPP?

Discord is, as people *experience* it, an interface with a set of affordances. XMPP is a protocol. It may be useful to a future Discord replacement, but no, it's not in and of itself a replacement.

You could try to build a Discord-a-like on top of XMPP. You could try building it on top of a bunch of different federation protocols, or variations thereon. I imagine @cwebber has some ideas about that ; )

@cwebber @spritely is it going to be a new protocol or maybe build on top of xmpp or matrix?

Bill, organizer of stuff Feb 11

@spritely @cwebber Can you help Zulip achieve this (and fix their conversation thread model)? 🥺

Rihards Olups Feb 11

@wcbdata @spritely @cwebber Zulip is great, but what do you find wrong with topics there?

Bill, organizer of stuff Feb 11

@spritely @cwebber @richlv I know it's a personal preference, but I like the threaded replies model in Slack & Discord better than the "topic" approach in Zulip. Topic to me seems redundant with Channel - sort of like a long-lived email subject line, whereas threaded replies are much more focused and help me visually associate conversations.

Rihards Olups Feb 11

@wcbdata @spritely @cwebber
Hmm, I could see them being somewhat redundant in a small community, but anything past that would surely benefit from nested structure.

Regarding the threaded mode, I have used Slack very little, and Discord maybe once, so no good experience - but I'll just imagine it's like mailing list archives :)
I can see benefits and drawbacks in both modes. In a way, quoting in Zulip might replace full threading, and allow the topics to remain more focused.

Rihards Olups Feb 11

@wcbdata @spritely @cwebber
The mailing-list-archive-like threading has other problems - going down all the threads is a bit tiresome, as one has to jump between conversations in time and subtopics. It's also not quite what mailing list participants experience at the time - they view messages very sequentially.
Perhaps Zulip model better reflects that experience?

That doesn't guarantee it being better, though. Would be great to see proper studies on this :)

@wcbdata
> threaded replies are much more focused and help me visually associate conversations

Have you tried the threading in Element or another Matrix app? If so, how does that compare to what Zulip and Discord do?

@spritely @cwebber @richlv

@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.

Bill, organizer of stuff Feb 11

@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 :)

@wcbdata @viq lack of e2ee and federation

@cwebber @spritely Its so frustrating that all the other replacements should be good options, but they're not because they either don't work or have a difficult to use UX. If you end up doing this please make it usable 😭

Big Ducky Feb 11

@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!

Fluxer: A chat app that puts you first

Fluxer is a free and open source instant messaging and VoIP platform built for friends, groups, and communities.

Fluxer

A cool crab wearing shades Feb 12

@bigducky
@danvolchek @cwebber @spritely

oh these are very interesting. i gotta try to find out what kind of server specs are required and the state of self hosting. like Stoat is ostensibly self hostable but i know someone who has done it and it was miserable.

@neckspike @bigducky @cwebber @spritely have you seen the docker compose file for Stoat? It's absolutely massive

@danvolchek Maybe I'm just naïve, but how big a deal-breaker is less-than-great UX? I mean, against the privacy issues involved? I feel like I'd be willing to live with a crappy UX and accept working towards improvement, if my other options was surrending privacy.

@wesdym Fair, but if none of my friends want to switch then it's a deal breaker

polyfloyd Feb 11

@cwebber @spritely Will you pick an existing project and nurture it? Or start from scratch?

There are plenty of alternative Discord-projects out there, some of which already have some degree or promise of federation. I would find it wasteful to start the Nth competitor. XKCD 927.

@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.

polyfloyd Feb 11

@dthompson @cwebber @spritely The most mentioned one would be https://stoat.chat/. I heard it is decent but I have not tried it myself.

Alternatively:
* https://commet.chat/
* https://fluxer.app/
* https://fermi.chat/
* https://sharkord.com/
* https://www.rootapp.com/

And probably a few more that I have not yet discovered. This is a crowded space, holy shit

Stoat - Find your community

Stoat is the chat app for friends and communities that finally works the way you always wished it would.

@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.

Shanie MyrsTear Feb 11

@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.

Shanie MyrsTear Feb 11

@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.

Mx Verda Feb 11

@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

Shanie MyrsTear Feb 12

@MxVerda …that’s a good question, I don’t know the answer to that. So like an audio version of browsing “TikTok’s” (like spontaneously rolling up on music or podcasts)?