A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
The marketing mixes metaphors, talking about gardening, growing, curating… all part of sustainable process that includes plants dying.
It also uses words like forever and permanent.
Having content live forever is at odds with metaphors of the natural world, where things naturally die.
Well permaculture is a thing in gardening ^^
I mean, it's not "forever" as in "until the end of all things", but as much set and forget as I would like in a knowledgebase (and in a garden).
I think the metaphors refer to different aspects of the project. The gardening refers to a more deliberate, small scale, cultivated experience tailored to your community, which is opposed to commercial factory farms that produce a monoculture on a massive scale for profit.
The permanence refers to the fact that you own and control the data, so you are in control of its lifecycle, not a third party that could kill it at their discretion.
Will have to look into this. Been saying for a while that a wiki-forum combo would make sense, since a forum slowly becomes a repository of knowledge, if not generally then at least for its members, and a less linear and more browsable way to catalog that knowledge would make sense. You can set up a separate wiki server but then you have two things to manage and moderate.
Whatever happened to vBulletin? That was peak forum software. Simple to use, no frills, and no bloated tracking shit.
All the car community forums are operated by Fora at this point, and they're trying to push some bullshit AI assistant called "ForaFrank". I blocked it on every car forum I'm a part of, and have encouraged others to do the same.
It mentions many AI features. Is this vibe-coded?
From what I can tell the author uses AI assistance in creating API endpoints and some front end styling, based on some clause code agent files in the repo. Whether that is for prototyping client changes after making backend changes, or thats what winds up in the official client, I cannot say. It’s a good thought though as it’s not really mentioned on the main site.
From reading his blog he seems to be not be yet another AI bro and I sort of agree with his position on the ultimate usefulness of AI. There is little to no AI generation implemented in the app, it seems mostly designed as a search function and is optional.
Looks like the pictures are also AI generated?
Some kind of weird WebGL error on their site I've never seen before.
Doesn't load for me.
LibreWolf doesn't seem to be offering to activate canvas.
Oh well.
Same for me, why does a forum software need webgl?
You mean why does the site for a forum software need webgl, by which the only reason I can think of is tracking visitors somehow. It's not like the background landscape on the site is dynamic or something.
But, background is dynamic. You can see it has some kind of fancy moving dots. It's totally unnecessary, but clearly WebGL was used for that.
Oh, so it is, hadn't noticed it at first.
And, sure enough, disabling webgl in about:config causes the page to throw the error, instead of degrading gracefully. An animation of random dots is not at all necessary to expose about a product that is a web forum.
There is also a 3D spinning globe, so that too.
Once again, something that is absolutely not needed to explain what a forum software is and thus, should degrade gracefully. To a static png or something.
Application error: a client-side exception has occurred while loading www.storyden.org (see the browser console for more information).
Exactly same error for me. I'm glad there are such indicators so I don't have to waste my time on such a crappy overcomplicated design.
Could be something everyone is blocking in their browsers. I know I use arkenfox. No joy with LibreWolf or Waterfox. I did pull it up in Opera, and it worked ok. I didn't browse any further than the front page. I only use Opera for paying bills as Firefox, LibreWolf, and Waterfox are set up to block a lot of excess crap, and my utilities love their bullshit webpage candy.
Works fine in Firefox on Android
Same for me in IronFox.
Also on cromite. Both disable webgl by default, iirc.
Not like a forum has a reasonable use case that requires webgl, tho.
Me too
I find it strange that they themselves have a Discord link in the footer.
Because it's not for replacing discord it's a modern version of phpbb or vbulliten forums, the OP mentions this
Ones where live chat and voice rooms aren’t the focus.
It’s a combination of forums and knowledge base that would be perfect for this use case.
looks like a great alternative for the kinds of Discord servers
That is correct. However, OP says right before:
a great alternative for the kinds of Discord servers centered around Open Source projects and organizations
That's because it aims to replace one of the wrong use cases that projects (FOSS or not) weirdly decide to use Discord for, such as replacement for a "contact forum" or "support forum".
Such a great point.
I've refused to use software that require things like Discord or Telegram for support.
Use a proper tool on your website.
I know, I literally quoted the line after it to put emphasis on the fact he wasn't saying it's a discord replacement but one where live chat and voice rooms aren't the focus
tbh he could have just said it's a new type of forum because it really has nothing to do with discord at all
It has unfortunately, a lot to do with Discord. I am a members of a dozen or so Discord servers, none of which are used for live chat, audio, screen sharing, etc. This software would be a 1:1 replacement for all of those servers.
You should be correct in saying that this software is not a replacement for Discord, but it is, just not in every single instance.
Oh great more cool FOSS projects to bookmark
Love this... Will take a spin for my OpenAstra
Mind, seems to be vibecoded.
So?
It's 2026, being vibecoded is a self-explanatory problem.
Well, I have seen so many classic coders write shitty unmaintainable and insecure code that I don't think that NOT being vibe coded mean anything.
It's like the difference bewteen publicly-traded and privately-owned companies. Publicly-traded companies are guaranteed to enshittify due to fiduciary duty. Privately-owned companies could enshittify, but it's not guaranteed.
A human programmer could be shit but at least they're not guaranteed to be shit like the vibe coding AI
I like the analogy...
But at the end of the day better to have something that starts shitty but can be improved over time rather than nothing.
If it stays shitty, then it's just shit and won't go anywhere.
And how is it supposed to get less shit if it's vibe coded? The programmer didn't learn anything when making the initial build
Maybe other devs join and improve the code, or maybe the original del learns and improve, or maybe he was already good bit had zero time and after a while goes back to improve the vibe coded project....
I prefer to judge by the results rather than by the means used.
The era of not judging the means ended in, like, 1066 or smth. Vibe-coded stuff for example means burning down a couple of forests just so the AI can propose where to place a semicolon, long before a "result" is even visible.
Its a common practice in bars and coffee shops in italy to keep a faucet running all day to always have cold water at hand. You should stop drinking coffe than to save clean water....
To be fair, I should have stopped drinking coffee 10 years ago for my blood pressure.
This looks ... great.
Looks cool. Is it already supported by NixOS?