Another Discord alternative that popped up a few months ago like the others out of no where. This one promises voice channels and is evidently entirely encrypted.
But out of the blue they “halted” service and now one again are open for registration?
Has anyone tried this yet ? Just a web app and it’s not open source.
While it sounds promising , and not everything HAS to open source. I just can’t help but feel off about something…
From here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46745164
Hey everyone, two of us have been working on a privacy-focused Discord alternative for some time and we’re opening it up for early testing to see how it performs and to get real feedback.
Kloak is privacy-first by design. There are no emails and no passwords. When you join, you’re given a secret key, and that key is your account. There is no recovery mechanism and no central identity tied to you. If the key is lost, the account is gone. This is intentional and meant to reduce stored user data and avoid creating identity honeypots.
Most of the core features are already in place. You can create servers, channels, roles, and permissions, upload files and custom emojis, etc.
We’re still early, and the main goal right now is to validate the model, catch UX issues, and stress the system a bit before going further. We’re especially interested in thoughts around the key-based account approach and any privacy or security trade-offs we may be overlooking.
If you’re curious or want to poke at it, it takes only a few seconds to join and doesn’t require any personal information. You can join Kloak at https://kloak.app/
Feel free to join our official server too through https://kloak.app/invite/PV3FEB8N
It seems like a lot of these pop-up proprietary projects are failing to diagnose the problem with Discord, namely the centralized control.
It’s like people leaving Twitter for Bluesky… it doesn’t actually change the situation. We’ve just created a new centralized service with a different group of people who can change things on a whim as it suits their financial goals.
In Swedish kloak means sewer.
In spanish “cloaca/alcantarilla” mean exactly the same.
Pronounced “kloo-awk” approximately
Like cloaca without the a?
It’s always the furries, every time.
In the case of our communication apps, they do have to be open-source and GPL licensed, otherwise we’re crossing our fingers that they’ll respect privacy, and kicking the can down the road until it enshittifies.
Being able to be self-hosted and federated are also essential for long-term stability and preventing centralization.
The two best discord alternatives we have available to us that meet those requirements are Movim and Fluxer. I would not consider any other options.
Matrix has a lot of problems, some of them inherent to its design, including spreading metadata of encrypted messages to any server that participates in a chat room (this metadata includes the time the message was sent, size, sender and recipients of messages).
I’m not personally a fan of it, despite it being federated.
what about stoat?
Not personally a fan of it since it’s not federated (and has no plans to implement federation) meaning its one centralized point of failure and one centralized point for governments to subpoena. It has no plans to implement any form of encryption (Movim has solid encryption, and Fluxer plans to implement encrypted DMs in the future).
Also very concerning to me is that it uses the MIT license, which allows for the company to do a rug-pull and close-source the code in the future so they can enshittify it. Only the GPL license ensures that it remains open-source and in the community’s hands forever.
If it was GPL and they wanted to go closed source, they could do it since they are the authors.
The MIT is a problem when others (not the authors) go closed source.
i’ll need to keep fiddling with movim, as it still won’t let me have voice or video calls. the movim.eu account does however allow me to take good calls via dino, so that’s something.
I found with Movim that you need to ensure that both you and the other person have each other added as contacts (and both parties each accepted those contact requests) for the call button to show up, just being in a chat with each other isn’t enough (and that is quite painful UX, since there’s no information that explains that that must be done).
I think it won’t show a call button if it doesn’t detect a microphone either.
well, i certainly had that issue you’re mentioning with no call button showing up, but i made a separate group chat (since i was planning on using this for chill chats whilst gaming with more than one person). in that group chat i can click the call button, but it’ll just crash on me. mby movim doesn’t like firefox and mby it doesn’t like linux. dunno, but i wont give up on it yet
I’m waiting for fluxer development personnaly
What do you mean "evidently entirely encrypted "? Surely the evidence for that would be its source code?
I guess they meant “allegedly”.
