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

abadidea Feb 12

note that I didn’t even touch on audio/video calls and screen sharing, which are HEAVILY used features of discord, but we can start with “a solid chatroom experience” as the minimum viable replacement; if you can’t get that part right, discussing the rest with a straight face is clownshoes

gkrnours Feb 12

@0xabad1dea french government have an open source replacement for google meet, could be a good starting place to offer audio/video next to solid chat

https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet

GitHub - suitenumerique/meet: Open source video conferencing app powered by LiveKit.

Open source video conferencing app powered by LiveKit. - suitenumerique/meet

GitHub

Je ne suis pas goth Feb 12

@gkrnours @0xabad1dea technically they also have a chat system (Tchap), which is nowhere near as advanced as what discord/slack offer.

gkrnours Feb 12

@0xabad1dea @jenesuispasgoth ok but everyone and their grandma can make a chat system. And tchap is a frontend for element.io

Je ne suis pas goth Feb 12

@gkrnours @0xabad1dea it is a front-end, yes. I fail to see how this addresses the issue I mention — namely: it's not bad, but does not provide the stack of features that Discord/Slack offer to their users, especially UI/UX wise.

gabboman the wafrn dev Feb 12

I do consider federation important. Single point of failure and all that

Ratsnake Games 🔞Feb 12

@0xabad1dea @gabboman if you don't make it distributed, you also have to host the entire bloody thing - which gets expensive once you add video chat and/or screensharing at any meaningful scale

tkissing Feb 12

@ratsnakegames WebRTC can work for about 80% of network configuration with just STUN and for small calls at least, especially audio only, the call quality should be at least as good as unboosted Discord. No need to shove any media thru a server. If the rest of the experience is great, this could be fine. And with the right architecture, TURN could be configured per server/channel/whatever, allowing users to either self host that OR pay (opening up a revenue option without forcing monopoly)

Ratsnake Games 🔞Feb 12

@tkissing yeah, a system that works about 80% of the time sounds completely like it ticks off the minimum requirements listed above in 0xabadidea's original post.

"Oh yeah, let me just check if peer-to-peer works for us or if i need to spin up a server real quick" is... a baffling thought to expect a random user of your software product to have.

tkissing Feb 12

@ratsnakegames 80% of network configurations != 80% of the time. A good portion of those 20% in my experience are corporate networks, which isn't exactly prime Discord territory. Very few ISPs cause double NAT situations without users having a chance to fix it. In home setups double NAT is already a problem for a bunch of other use cases, including many online games - and the fix is usually a one-time setting change in the ISP provided router. Again, Discord users are unlikely to be in that sit.

Joshua Miller Feb 12

@ratsnakegames @0xabad1dea @gabboman I'm not sure it's true that adding video/screensharing would significantly increase cost. I think the centralized service could facilitate establishing the network link between the parties and have them send the feed more-or-less directly. But I may simply be mincing words here - that could be interpreted as making it distributed.

Fea Crow Feb 12

To be honest I do not think the normal user who is just sick of Discord and looks for something similar does really care, but it is good to have it in case you want it later I guess

Most of my friends do not even know what federation means, I have to explain to them what I learned from using Mastodon and WAFRN myself

FreediverX Feb 12

@crowfea
That normal user will care in a few years when the platform is bought out by a sociopathic billionaire and everyone has to start all over from scratch.

flori_ava_star:~

cursor_blinking

:made-with-estrogen:

verifiedlesbian

@crowfea @0xabad1dea @gabboman Federation doesn't have to mean bad UX. If you have to explain it, it's bad UX. E-Mail is federated, and you don't have to explain to someone how that works.

If you don't have federation, you are not solving the problem. It's like hitting "snooze" on your alarm in the morning, but the alarm is there for a good reason

Katzenmann / Catperson Feb 13

@star @crowfea @0xabad1dea @gabboman Discord is good because it's got many users across many communities. An open discord alternative would need to be as seamless as discord. The community does not have the resources to host a single centralized discord alternative but many properly integrated small servers are possible.

Someone build this please

Mike Spooner Feb 12

@gabboman @0xabad1dea Agreed, although a resilient pile of non-working turds is not going to cut it.

Ratsnake Games 🔞Feb 12

@0xabad1dea i'd actually argue that Whatsapp and clones already offer a decent alternative for text chats for a lot of people, so audio/video chat is *absolutely* part of any minimum viable replacement

Mike Spooner Feb 12

@ratsnakegames @0xabad1dea You mean the same WhatsApp that is wholly-owned by Meta?

Ratsnake Games 🔞Feb 12

@0xabad1dea @shelldozer that does not deter people from using it en masse.

Ratsnake Games 🔞Feb 12

@0xabad1dea @shelldozer also, no, i mean the Whatsapp that is co-owned by Walmart, the Italian Mafia, and Migros. Duh.

@0xabad1dea #Zulip & #RocketChat do that if you want to have logs like a fed and suffer from FOMO so you can't use #IRC...

https://infosec.space/@kkarhan/116058411874869363

PixelHamster Feb 12

@0xabad1dea I'm pretty sure you do need federation.

Running a single instance would crumble under any comparable user-share that discord handles + who would finance that, in my eyes the fediverse runs on homelabbers and some donations ?

But revolt/stoat kinda sounds like what you described no ?

Christopher Snowhill Feb 15

@0xabad1dea I was told that I should not want all of these things in a single app, because it could mean a single point of failure for a whole community or a given selection of users. So I should instead want all of my contacts and services spread out amongst a huge selection of different things, any number of which can fail at any given time, but what are the chances that all of them fail all at once?

Pendell 🔜 TFF Feb 17

@0xabad1dea I'm monitoring the situation with great concern but at this point if Discord asks my ID I'll probably give it to them, because it's where all my friends are and nothing else is even close. Maybe Telegram but it's worse for many reasons.

archiloque Feb 12

@0xabad1dea things you need : enough furries on the team?

@archiloque @0xabad1dea transfem furries!

They may also make reproduceable builds on #nixOS for all OSes whilst at it...

https://infosec.space/@kkarhan/116058416242800452

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

Space Hobo Feb 12

@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.

> - any fucking clue how Discord works and why people use it

I think this puzzles me most. I just... don't. I tried, multiple times. I don't get it.

> - a user interface that is Normal
> - higher standards of user experience than how irc actually works in the real world

... which is also why I wouldn't agree here, because I find Discords UI horrible :'-D

But so is Element's etc. whelp

Katar Jin -> Home*CAW*Feb 12

What's so hard to get? A chat and voice program where you can share your screen with only a few clicks. Before you needed like 4 different applications to do that and most of them were..not that good or you had to pay for.

@katarjin.bsky.social @0xabad1dea Idk, I dislike Skype but it did tick those boxes as well :'-D

But it's mostly the UX. I find the threads and channels and idk everything very... overwhelming. I never find the stuff I wanted to reply to.

Claudius Link Feb 12

@ljrk @katarjin.bsky.social @0xabad1dea
I'm with you. I didn't/don't get Slack, Discord, Matrix (and neither IRC). I understand group chats but as soon as they get busy I'm completely overwhelmed and feel left alone by the tools

@realn2s @katarjin.bsky.social @0xabad1dea IRC I can work with (I use Halloy), but only smaller group chats ^^'

FreediverX Feb 12

@katarjin.bsky.social
The basic concept is fine. The user interface is a mess.

Amy Worrall Feb 12

@0xabad1dea @drahardja One login, alll your ‘servers’ listed.

Anything that makes you do a new separate signup per ‘server’ has a lot more friction than Discord.

Celes 🌙Feb 12

you forgot:

windows live messenger sounds and emoticons

Peter Dantini Feb 13

@celestia FYI: https://escargot.chat

Escargot | MSN Messenger and Windows Live Messenger

Celes 🌙Feb 13

@pokecaptain yes! someone shared with me the other day, I still need to try it but it's so nice that there's people working on this

@0xabad1dea I think a huge part of the last point is the room and privilege management, allowing you to somewhat properly moderate your server. The ability to create thematic rooms is, I think, what drives many people to matrix, even in smaller communities it can be super helpful to have different thematic areas on the same server. A feature that I learned to value a lot

@0xabad1dea federation is extremely useful though here.

@0xabad1dea Dear user, please download our program and then use this Terminal command to bypass system security feature

Ratsnake Games 🔞Feb 12

@0xabad1dea @isis yeah, that tends to happen when properly using the system security features require an annual ransom

@isis @0xabad1dea com.apple.quarantine is not a security feature.

It is a sales tool.

@isotopp @0xabad1dea If you’re German, I must ask you not to reply to my posts. T.I.A.

Rive 🐀Feb 14

@isis @0xabad1dea if you can't get your macOS app notarized, why are you even developing a Mac app to begin with

V For Viennetta Feb 16

@rive @isis @0xabad1dea It costs a negligible amount per year, there’s really no reason not to unless you just don’t wanna

CyberFrog Feb 12

@0xabad1dea discord has multiparty end to end encryption so you do actually need this for voice and video data

@froge @0xabad1dea or you could just seperate #Chat and #Voice functionality into smaller tools...

https://infosec.space/@kkarhan/116058411874869363

Roger BW 😷Feb 12

@0xabad1dea (I realise I'm muted here, but I think some of those negative points are significant)
- No federation: some bastard can come along and buy it. Doesn't matter if I can run my own if everyone else is on the Nazi Server. Federation is not proof against this (see email) but it's a necessary start.
- No multiparty e2e encryption: we don't care about black or gay or trans people being allowed to talk without everything they say being fed into the secret police machine. They, however, do.

Dmitry Tantsur Feb 12

@RogerBW @0xabad1dea these are fair points, but you need to keep in mind that not every chat room is designed for high stakes conversations. Offline parallel: you're applying the security standards of a revolutionary cell to a comic convention or a book club. Which would be fine if it did not lead to significantly degraded user experience.

Roger BW 😷Feb 12

@creepy_owlet @0xabad1dea I agree that that's a valid argument; the downside is that leaving out encryption is essentially telling significant numbers of people (deliberately or not) "we're not for you, we're only for people with enough social capital that they don't have to watch what they say and people who are eternally on edge".
That may work for whatever use case you have in mind of course, and I've done things like that myself, but these days it's not a good smell.

🇨🇦🇩🇪🇨🇳张殿李🇨🇳🇩🇪🇨🇦Feb 13

@RogerBW @creepy_owlet @0xabad1dea You know what else is not a good smell? "Everybody else needs to cater to my niche needs."

That's actually kind of a terrible smell. Indeed it's the kind of smell that has historically killed movements.

V For Viennetta Feb 16

@ZDL @RogerBW @creepy_owlet @0xabad1dea This is half the issue with new open social media stuff, it always winds up with everyone bikeshedding about how the fun user friendly chat app for normal gamers to shitpost needs to have features to allow people to securely plan a violent overthrow of the state, or to resist a hypothetical future takeover by Elon Musk, and because they outnumber all the normal people involved in development (zero) they all get their way

End result - the world has yet another hideously complex user unfriendly social app and everyone gets really upset that nobody is using it

Any similarities to Mastodon are entirely intentional

Eggs now in different baskets.Feb 12

@creepy_owlet @RogerBW @0xabad1dea My experience of trying to keep chat channels for specific purposes on topic is that many people find it hard to stay on topic

Suddenly personal information pops up as they either forget or can't be bothered opening another channel or a private chat. Or they really don't understand the difference between "private" and "private".

So if you apply the security standards of a revolutionary cell to normal chats then what you "blurt out" will always remain private.

V For Viennetta Feb 16

@the_wub @creepy_owlet @RogerBW @0xabad1dea Realistically though most peoples’ real world threat models are not things that are going to involve the government, and those who do actually have that need for privacy already have abundant options and will already be using them

Eggs now in different baskets.Feb 16

@j0ebaldw1n @creepy_owlet @RogerBW @0xabad1dea Ah, Grasshopper, you must not forget this quote often attributed to Cardinal Richelieu:

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."

Once the AI agent built into your device with root user privileges is let loose on your data you will never know where your data will end up.

In the hands of modern day Cardinal Richelieus?

https://finance.yahoo.com/video/ai-agents-perilous-secure-apps-135325425.html

#chatcontrol #e2ee

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Michael 🐸Feb 12

Thank you.

Enej Johhem Feb 12

@0xabad1dea End to end encryption would be a really cool bonus