Post #587541
2026-02-09 16:26 UTC
Riding the coat tails of the latest Discord news to remind people that I'm working on a self-hosted chat service called CritterChat that prioritizes experience, ease of use and refusal to collect private information. I made the decision early on not to obsess over E2EE, we have plenty of services that support this and all of them suffer in every other dimension. I also made the decision not to sit atop one of the many larger JS frameworks that cause issues on lower-spec computers and spotty mobile connections.
I hope to make 1:1 and private group conversations federate between instances at some point in the future, as well as allowing your home instance to be a login provider for other instances that enable it. Essentially, if you trust your fedi instance admin, you should be able to trust your CritterChat instance admin at the same level, and you should be able to chat freely without private information collection or laborious setup.
https://github.com/dragonminded/critterchat
Replies (3)
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@dragonminded@chitter.xyz 2026-02-09 16:41
It's a bit rough around the edges, especially around instance administration. But, this project has existed for less than a year and doesn't have the billions behind it that Discord does. Also, I can proudly state that I have never used genAI and will not start with this project, nor will I accept AI generated contributions. My hope is that for lots of smaller servers and open-source projects, if they feel the need for chat-based community they can look to CritterChat as an option.
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@vorboyvo@mstdn.isometry.group 2026-02-09 19:29
@dragonminded is this published under a particular licence?
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@arlofox@bark.lgbt 2026-02-10 05:55
@dragonminded I really like the very reasonable goals you have. I'll have to spin up an instance and play around with it.