Mastodawn

So You Want To Write An Open Source Discord Replacement

Things you don’t need:
- federation/distributed systems
- multiparty end-to-end encryption
- an entirely new operating system kernel specially designed to—

Things you DO need:
- a user interface that is Normal
- the ability to use languages other than English and writing systems other than Latin
- higher standards of user experience than how irc actually works in the real world
- any fucking clue how Discord works and why people use it

I have muted replies to this post due to the usual reasons

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Lesley Lai Feb 12

@0xabad1dea Agree with other stuff.

Federation was a "must" for me, but you make me think whether we actually need it if clients can just manage credentials for multiple servers. The friction can still be a bit high to create one account for each server, but maybe OAuth can help

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Space Hobo

@lesley @0xabad1dea Even in the IRC world, real communities got fed up with huge networks and created single-server systems that had no netsplits or admin battles or anything like that. It's 2026: we're no longer limited to 128 users per server on Linux like we were in 1993.