I had a random idea I wanted to throw out there and see what people think:
Imagine a federated platform that works kind of like Discord, but in the sense of Lemmy, Pixelfed, Mastodon, etc.—with different instances hosted by different people.
The twist is that none of the instances would be connected to each other.
Each instance would function like a regular Discord server: channels, chats, roles, and all the usual stuff, but the instances themselves wouldn’t federate with each other.
The interesting part is that these instances could still federate with other platforms—like Mastodon, Lemmy, Peertube, Pixelfed, Loops, etc.—just not with each other.
It seems like it could be a way to have smaller, self-contained communities while still integrating with the wider Fediverse in some ways.
My only sticking point is figuring out signup/login mechanics—how would a user navigate multiple isolated instances efficiently without it becoming a nightmare?
Would love to hear thoughts, improvements, or whether anyone thinks this is a terrible idea.
You can federate Matrix using Synapse.
I think if Matrix were easier to deploy, it would have a lot more adoption for this kind of thing. Once Matrix is set up and running, it runs great! Put energy toward improving Matrix deployment (and don’t give me yet another ansible playbook or docker file… it should be as easy to set up on bare metal as forgejo or you’re doin’ it wrong) instead of building something new from scratch.
How much easier can it even get to deploy? You start it, point your domain at it and you’re good to go.
This idea makes no sense. The reason people use discord instead of forums (other than the slick interface) is that you can find other discord servers (i.e. “forums”) without changing accounts.
It’s called matrix.
literally funded by mossad
It was originally funded by amdocs, a US and Israeli company, but they have their own funding for many years now.
Regardless, considering its entirely open source, buildable from source, self-hostable (and auditable), which is more than you can say for signal, where the back end is centralized, and hosted in a five-eyes country.
Matrix requires no “just trust us” clause unlike signal, because you can run the software yourself, and verify that its not making calls to US or Israeli servers.
XMPP?
I have been looking for a self hosted alternative to Discord if anybody knows some good options. I don’t need it to federate with anything not sure what you’re going for there… Closest option so far looked to be TS6, but they don’t seem keen on allowing self hosting for that. Apparently there’s a license that’s only good for two months. Would love to get my friends off discord and onto something local that has chat channels and screen sharing still.
There’s Revolt.chat, which is pretty much aiming to be just a self-hostable Discord clone
Edit: Apparently it’s called Stoat now. That’s definitely a downgrade in the naming department
Just to make this abundantly clear, we received a cease & desist against our use of the name ‘Revolt’, we are not releasing any further details as this may cause harassment of the other party and may hurt negotiations.
Damn, that sucks. I wonder who the whiny IP baby is.
Goddamnit. IP bullshit like this is why I have Rebellion (the game studio) on my blacklist
