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Todexian Ramblings - 02/2026 , numbero TWO
2 months ago
General
The half-time journal
Yeah! Why the heck not.
The first week of this month we saw lots of drama around discord's age verification nonsense that shall impact the planet early next month.
So since then, I've been taking serious looks around at alternatives - self-hostable services, I mean.
No commercially hosted messaging platform will be able to evade the political pressure of identifying their users in the most anonymity destroying manner. (Because that's cheap, and also great to sell more data for advertisement money making reasons)
For example Matrix.org has welcomed new discord exiles, but made it clear that they will also verify user age/ID soon. At least on the publically hosted server instances, which I assume 90% of people will use.
I have seen many furries flood onto Stoat - a discord clone, formerly called Revolut. The company that develops it sits in the UK. As a UK company, of course they will verify the identity of the users as well - they will have to. Law says so.
Stoat can be self-hosted. If you have a server, you can set it up just for yourself and your friends with no corporate oversight. But it is a huge stack of interconnected services! And I look at it with dread.
Extra-nerdy paragraph following, you can skip this ###
Stoat uses a huge stack. Database - Mongo of course. Redis as message broker. Another message broker. An S3 storage server (minio of all things, they have ceased maintaining their repo in december! But could be replaced.) Add to that an API server, a web server, an events service, a web app, a file server, metadata and image proxy, task daemons, push notification service... And half of this is shit that they clobbered together on their own. Audited? Heck naw.
There are so many 0-day and N-day exploits waiting to be found and used there, so many opportunities for Shit to Go Wrong™, I couldn't keep this safe and stable. It would be a 24/7 job.
None of Stoat's user data/messages are encrypted. No end to end encryption, each of those services sees the raw data. No privacy. Of course they would have to police the uploads as well to scan for peepees and kiddie porns.
For a strictly isolated service that sits behind a VPN or just in an internal network? Maybe. For anything more? Nah :D
### Nerdy paragraph finished!
So what else is there! Cloud offerings are out. They will all take your anonymity away and look at what you post. First in the name of the children, then in the name of preventing political statements that the people in power don't like. And eventually you'll just get jailed or shot for something you said privately 5 years ago. (Hopefully things will change before it escalates this far, but you know, it takes time for the old people who keep electing the even older people who make these laws to die out.)
So message encryption is needed. I think this is really sensible because sooner or later all of the hosting companies will also be put under pressure to snoop. Or just get gag-ordered by their respective secret services in power.
I'd rather have it that my root server has no data that is of any use to anyone take an uninvited look, IF someone comes to take a look.
I don't do anything evil other than lust over monstery dicks and tech like any respectable mad-shark xD But it is out of principle. When I feel constantly watched and I begin to not say things how I think and feel them, that is just not good.
Another very nerdy paragraph ahead! You may skip this if you don't care about a list of things I tested: ###
I looked at these things and set up local copies to explore their features or self-hostability:
- Matrix- the homeservers are really resource heavy and lack admin features such as message deletion, managing file attachments, garbage collection, moderation, etc. Group chats are not encrypted. Metadata is not encrypted. The chat clients are awful. Federation is clunky. The developers are busy huffing the fumes of their own greatness.
- Delta Chat - Actually very interesting. Uses modified email servers as backend to pass messages around. Encrypted messages, and the security claims have been audited. Messages aren't stored on the server forever, but just long enough so they get delivered. Problem: Email servers get pelted with spam attempts and it requires opening quite many outdated ports for old email compatibility reasons. Who would send unencrypted emails in this day and age??? If they could settle on just using one port for the email communication and get rid of the legacy garbage, I think this could be a really cool thing to self host!
- SimpleX - I think this might be the most maximally encrypted chat protocol I've seen to date. Amazing tech... sadly it only has one chat client, and that is an absolute turd. Even worse than the one for Matrix! 600-900 MB RAM usage for an anemic feature-lacking client? Fuck straight off to hell. With a better client, I think this could be great. Don't see it happening anytime soon though.
- Tinode - Looks like a self-hosted telegram. Similar chat features. Very easy to write clients for this. Overall not terrible! But: No encryption. No federation. This might grow into something good over time. Right now for my purposes: No.
- IRC Servers - Too cumbersome to maintain. Also most web hosts I have been at explicitly forbid running one of them. Few clients have features that people are expecting from modern chat clients. Not encrypted.
- XMPP Servers - Robust, clunky to set up though. Only one/two XMPP clients actually support modern end to end encryption and other fancy features, most have been severely neglected over the past decade. It is an option I'll look more into.
- Databag - Interesting! Encrypted messages, encrypted group chats. Very lightweight and uncomplicated service, most parts written in Go. Can run even on a single core server. For a small friends circle or special project, I can see myself using this, even though it lacks super advanced fancy features right now. Nice built-in web UI. Friendly developer. Encryption has not been audited though, not sure if it's any good. Might have gaping holes.
- Nerimity Adaptchat / StrafeChat - Visual discord clones. I'm tempted to say hot garbage. If any of these survive more than a few months I'd be surprised. Obviously not encrypted.
- Stoat As already rambled about in the passage up there, it is not an option.
All of these things rely on some form of external helper for audio and video calls, and in each case the users are wishing for a built-in solution. Seems to be a difficult thing to solve. None do any desktop sharing as far as I can see.
Is it really that hard? Though one could solve this problem by just self-hosting a stream using Owncast or something similar, I suppose. And for voice calls there is Mumble or Teamspeak. But again, users are lazy and don't like splitting up tasks like that.
### Nerd section over!
So I wish I had found a perfect thing yet and could say: AYYY I FOUND THE PERFECT THING!! But there are pros and cons to be carefully considered.
I want to find something decent and stop this demolishing of my anonymity and privacy. Jumping from one burning building to another will not stop this. It only works when one isolated company goes mad because their shareholders or new company told it to -- see Tumblr back in 2015 or so. But this time it is NOT just discord suddenly having gotten mad on their own, it is a systemic problem that will affect *all* public platforms. One by one. Until you give up, or get out.
Hosting one for your friend circle seems the only way out. :0 And that's the plan.
Are any of ye also looking into this?
Thoughts? Plans? Are you already running some chat server? I'm curious. Uwu
Yeah! Why the heck not.
The first week of this month we saw lots of drama around discord's age verification nonsense that shall impact the planet early next month.
So since then, I've been taking serious looks around at alternatives - self-hostable services, I mean.
No commercially hosted messaging platform will be able to evade the political pressure of identifying their users in the most anonymity destroying manner. (Because that's cheap, and also great to sell more data for advertisement money making reasons)
For example Matrix.org has welcomed new discord exiles, but made it clear that they will also verify user age/ID soon. At least on the publically hosted server instances, which I assume 90% of people will use.
I have seen many furries flood onto Stoat - a discord clone, formerly called Revolut. The company that develops it sits in the UK. As a UK company, of course they will verify the identity of the users as well - they will have to. Law says so.
Stoat can be self-hosted. If you have a server, you can set it up just for yourself and your friends with no corporate oversight. But it is a huge stack of interconnected services! And I look at it with dread.
Extra-nerdy paragraph following, you can skip this ###
Stoat uses a huge stack. Database - Mongo of course. Redis as message broker. Another message broker. An S3 storage server (minio of all things, they have ceased maintaining their repo in december! But could be replaced.) Add to that an API server, a web server, an events service, a web app, a file server, metadata and image proxy, task daemons, push notification service... And half of this is shit that they clobbered together on their own. Audited? Heck naw.
There are so many 0-day and N-day exploits waiting to be found and used there, so many opportunities for Shit to Go Wrong™, I couldn't keep this safe and stable. It would be a 24/7 job.
None of Stoat's user data/messages are encrypted. No end to end encryption, each of those services sees the raw data. No privacy. Of course they would have to police the uploads as well to scan for peepees and kiddie porns.
For a strictly isolated service that sits behind a VPN or just in an internal network? Maybe. For anything more? Nah :D
### Nerdy paragraph finished!
So what else is there! Cloud offerings are out. They will all take your anonymity away and look at what you post. First in the name of the children, then in the name of preventing political statements that the people in power don't like. And eventually you'll just get jailed or shot for something you said privately 5 years ago. (Hopefully things will change before it escalates this far, but you know, it takes time for the old people who keep electing the even older people who make these laws to die out.)
So message encryption is needed. I think this is really sensible because sooner or later all of the hosting companies will also be put under pressure to snoop. Or just get gag-ordered by their respective secret services in power.
I'd rather have it that my root server has no data that is of any use to anyone take an uninvited look, IF someone comes to take a look.
I don't do anything evil other than lust over monstery dicks and tech like any respectable mad-shark xD But it is out of principle. When I feel constantly watched and I begin to not say things how I think and feel them, that is just not good.
Another very nerdy paragraph ahead! You may skip this if you don't care about a list of things I tested: ###
I looked at these things and set up local copies to explore their features or self-hostability:
- Matrix- the homeservers are really resource heavy and lack admin features such as message deletion, managing file attachments, garbage collection, moderation, etc. Group chats are not encrypted. Metadata is not encrypted. The chat clients are awful. Federation is clunky. The developers are busy huffing the fumes of their own greatness.
- Delta Chat - Actually very interesting. Uses modified email servers as backend to pass messages around. Encrypted messages, and the security claims have been audited. Messages aren't stored on the server forever, but just long enough so they get delivered. Problem: Email servers get pelted with spam attempts and it requires opening quite many outdated ports for old email compatibility reasons. Who would send unencrypted emails in this day and age??? If they could settle on just using one port for the email communication and get rid of the legacy garbage, I think this could be a really cool thing to self host!
- SimpleX - I think this might be the most maximally encrypted chat protocol I've seen to date. Amazing tech... sadly it only has one chat client, and that is an absolute turd. Even worse than the one for Matrix! 600-900 MB RAM usage for an anemic feature-lacking client? Fuck straight off to hell. With a better client, I think this could be great. Don't see it happening anytime soon though.
- Tinode - Looks like a self-hosted telegram. Similar chat features. Very easy to write clients for this. Overall not terrible! But: No encryption. No federation. This might grow into something good over time. Right now for my purposes: No.
- IRC Servers - Too cumbersome to maintain. Also most web hosts I have been at explicitly forbid running one of them. Few clients have features that people are expecting from modern chat clients. Not encrypted.
- XMPP Servers - Robust, clunky to set up though. Only one/two XMPP clients actually support modern end to end encryption and other fancy features, most have been severely neglected over the past decade. It is an option I'll look more into.
- Databag - Interesting! Encrypted messages, encrypted group chats. Very lightweight and uncomplicated service, most parts written in Go. Can run even on a single core server. For a small friends circle or special project, I can see myself using this, even though it lacks super advanced fancy features right now. Nice built-in web UI. Friendly developer. Encryption has not been audited though, not sure if it's any good. Might have gaping holes.
- Nerimity Adaptchat / StrafeChat - Visual discord clones. I'm tempted to say hot garbage. If any of these survive more than a few months I'd be surprised. Obviously not encrypted.
- Stoat As already rambled about in the passage up there, it is not an option.
All of these things rely on some form of external helper for audio and video calls, and in each case the users are wishing for a built-in solution. Seems to be a difficult thing to solve. None do any desktop sharing as far as I can see.
Is it really that hard? Though one could solve this problem by just self-hosting a stream using Owncast or something similar, I suppose. And for voice calls there is Mumble or Teamspeak. But again, users are lazy and don't like splitting up tasks like that.
### Nerd section over!
So I wish I had found a perfect thing yet and could say: AYYY I FOUND THE PERFECT THING!! But there are pros and cons to be carefully considered.
I want to find something decent and stop this demolishing of my anonymity and privacy. Jumping from one burning building to another will not stop this. It only works when one isolated company goes mad because their shareholders or new company told it to -- see Tumblr back in 2015 or so. But this time it is NOT just discord suddenly having gotten mad on their own, it is a systemic problem that will affect *all* public platforms. One by one. Until you give up, or get out.
Hosting one for your friend circle seems the only way out. :0 And that's the plan.
Are any of ye also looking into this?
Thoughts? Plans? Are you already running some chat server? I'm curious. Uwu
A private server seems like the way to go.
I use SimpleX Chat for secure mobile chats on a GrapheneOS-loaded Pixel, Matrix homeserver for personal federation (+ voice/video/screen sharing) with friends servers, and then Mumble as an alternative to Discord or TeamSpeak 3 for voice chats.
Teamspeak 6 does have limited chat functionality and screen sharing but the v6 server is still in eternal beta and capped at 32 users, plus the chat needs you to be in the call too...
E-mail in conjunction with message boards would be the most tenable solution. I am fond of Jabber messenger also.
Hmmmm. It does mention End to End encryption opt-in, that is promising.
- Will I consent to a facial scan or hand over my ID just to use a chat service? Absolutely not.
- Are governments waking up 10 years too late and reaching for blunt, blanket solutions? Yes — and we’re all feeling the consequences.
- Do I think Discord is completely innocent? No. There are other ways to handle age verification that don’t involve biometric data or government‑grade ID collection, especially with the risk of data breaches—which Discord was a victim of—and hackers.
- What should actually be happening, in my opinion? Better education, better client‑side tools, and empowering parents instead of outsourcing everything to surveillance systems.
- What am I personally doing about Discord? Waiting, watching, and preparing for whatever comes next.
Your breakdown of the alternatives really drives home the point: this isn’t a “find the perfect platform” moment — it’s a systemic shift. Even if any of the options you listed were "Discord 2.0 with facial/ID-checks", it would eventually be targeted unless that pressure changes, the only real privacy left will likely be in small, self‑hosted spaces.
In the meantime, I'll dig in my heels and sit it out on whatever self hostable thing wins the contest xD
Maybe If you wanna be totally private and ungovernable you could try Meshtastic. It is not Discord but you can't stop the signal! (In a sense).
Also curious if you've looked into anything that can archive discord servers and DMs? There's more choices than I expected, I didn't think there was much past the generically named Discord Chat Exporter and a couple browser plugins that make you pay to extract more than a few hundred messages
As for Telegram.. obviously that will need to do the whole verification as well. Just give it a few months. So I expect that I'll have to give up my channel there too 8D
In either case I have a bit more confidence in telegram than most places lol.
Discord's DMs are entirely plaintext on their servers. :S Not something I like.
It's okay here on FA for instance, since I don't hold super private conversations in public or in notes, but on those other platforms that is different, isn't it~
Probably wouldn't be hitting people as hard if basically half the internet didn't go "join my discord server" instead of making a quick fandom.com wiki or something. I miss forums.
Outside of those though I really do hope forums start coming back... the destruction of the half of the internet that discord became is gonna split the community more than the dicks you draw split an ass, so it's inevitable that a good chunk of them will gravitate towards actual sites that can be search indexed. :D
Are you gonna be reviewing other potential discord competitors leading up to next month? Fluxer looks alright but it's only been around two seconds compared to many other options. Either way your technical experience is pretty invaluable right now lol.
At the moment I'm thinking I'll host a Zulip instance for a discord server replacement, it is a bit corporate-oriented but it can replicate the channels well enough. Unless I spot something better.
Still got a couple weeks left though, maybe discord will decide they're not gonna be able to recoup losses from cancelled nitro subs by selling biometrics to [insert eastern hemisphere country here]
IRC is always my fallback for groups, and I'm looking forward to seeing how far IRCv3 goes. At the same time, XMPP will forever be what I prefer overall for its massive set of XEP standards that make up the more modern features (voice & video, E2EE, offline messages, etc...), despite the warts it has. It's not a universal solution in any way (especially the lacking clients), but standards aren't going to be easily hijacked compared to a platform. I just don't see it being easy to draw people in unless they have highly-demanded features, like infinite log scrollback and screen sharing.
But yeah, I imagine only people who DID know these things would be willing to give them a try again, with the rest hopping from service to service and perhaps eventually just giving up and ID-ing themselves.
I rely so much on Discord in terms of friends and hobbies that I can't really be bothered to look for any alternatives, which seems to be pointless anyways according to this journal and by my own usage.
I'm a little worried about the future though and where all this leads, but we'll just have to wait and see, I guess? Good to know that people are searching for solutions though.
I've also used MegaUpload for a while and I think it'd be interesting to use their platform as a Discord alternative, since they have chat built into the service, I believe. Right now I rely on Proton Drive for cloud file hosting but I need to get a private media server set up soon here so my creative work and media collection is safe from AI scraping.
I agree how frustrating it is that encryption is still treated by the average user as an afterthought. I think it would be more sought after if it could be pitched as an anti-AI tool rather than strictly a privacy measure (they're the same thing really but I don't know how to make that clear to non-tech folks) but I also think it's bad in the long term to advertise encryption as just an AI deterrent because it should be prioritized long after the AI bubble bursts.
Ah MegaUpload was a fun thing eh? Now just called Mega. Actually for filehosting I already did research as well and found a few things that greatly please me in terms of ease of setting up, security and encryptability also. So that's well taken care off. -w-
I didn't even think of the AI angle ... you're quite right with that, Discord has a right to use any of the things for AI training that we uploaded into it :T
I'll check a look at roomy, hadn't heard of it yet!
Moving on, I'd love to hear about what options you are jumping into for file hosting, that's really my biggest concern right now. I do remember being pretty shocked by how extremely liberal Megaupload was with storage for a while there but yeah, now it's way more of a traditional cloud service than it was. Still preferable GDrive or OneDrive in my opinion.
Unfortunately, I'm always concerned with the AI angle. I know people who are saying the bubble will burst but I remember that being said about Crypto and I still see Venmo's "hey check out our Crypto wallet" every time I open their app so yeah, I doubt either of them are going away any time soon.
Are you looking to self host your file storage on a local server at home, or one in a datacenter that you control?
You could use another thing as the storage backend. If you encrypt the data before it gets uploaded, it wouldn't even matter if you park it on a commercial cloud, necessarily.
Weren't we at a similar point in the past again? Similar discussion. Maybe in 2011 or 2012? xD I think it was drop.io before it got swallowed...
Basically, any popular non-self hosted solutions are doomed to be forced to verify age. Technically, even if you host this shit yourself, but you have big enough traffic, a government may come and say that you either include age verification, or you'll be in jail.
But since I personally lack the resources (or will!) to host anything for more than a small circle of people, this will be fine.
Also as long as there is no way for random people to register accounts, I don't think the laws even apply. Because then it's not a public service after all.
Youtube completely denies me access unless I sign in - normally I open a private tab to look at links people send me, so it does not dirty my recommendations. Or I just download the videos. Now I have to sign in, with annoying side effects -A-
YAY, future!
I madea joke a while back, that at this point, we're gonna have resurrect Vauldeville just to properly sh*tpost.
I live in a very isolated area with a family i do NOT like, so Discord really helped me when i was a teenager, but now, im really hoping something changes before my entire small and fragile social life slips through my fingers "for the sake of the children".
I remember hearing that you won't actually have to provide your ID if Discord determines that you "seem like an adult" or whatever. I'm really hoping thats the case and me and my friends manage to make it through whatever determines us to be adults, because, otherwise, i genuinely don't know what i'm going to do.
I am not a very tech savvy person, and my friends are even LESS tech savvy than me, so i'm REALLY REALLY hoping that either Discord backs off of this for whatever reason, or theres an actually good alternative that comes up that isn't too difficult to use, since my friends are all lazy fucks, same as I.
Honestly, i think the feature that worries me the most is screen sharing, since it seems like not many other alternatives have that, and thats one of my most used features since I like to watch stuff with my friends.
Yeah they allegedly let their (in)fallible AI guesstimate your age on literally everything you privately said. So, hm. Not sure if this will satisfy regulators perpetually, we'll have to see.
The alternative that will win, will necessarily have to be the one that will verify the age in a way that does not require unmasking each user. Certainly possible, just I currently know of no such service.
Screen sharing is basically just livestreaming... for THAT, there are self-hostable solutions. Ah right you guys don't wanna do too techy things.. xD Well eventually there will be something that works out of the box.
I would like to eventually move to fluxer.
As of right now they have no federation but they are planning on adding it, but that will likely take quite a while.
I did run a matrix server for me and friends for some years, but it just lacks convenience features so I'm unsure if that'll be viable long-term :Sc
No really, just use these two.-