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.
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.
The commit history is 1 day.
Which is incredibly suspicious.
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.