Sharkord - Open Source Self-Hosted Chat Platform
sharkord.com
Privacy-first, self-hosted real-time chat platform. Own your data, control your conversations.

Came across this on the r/selfhosted community. Still very much in the alpha stages, but it’s already got a Docker image you can try out for yourself, or try out the demo server.

Tried it earlier today, couldn’t get the voice/video chat to work right away on my self-hosted setup but the real-time chat was very snappy. Looks promising.

  • eclipse7@feddit.nuEnglish
    454·
    18 days ago

    No E2E-encryption? Can’t find any info about it. Unencrypted = big nope. Looks good otherwise :)

    • aksdb@lemmy.worldEnglish
      654·
      18 days ago

      Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Discord isn’t E2EE either. Having data under your control even if not encrypted is a big win.

      • Drew@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        196·
        18 days ago

        why use this over the hundreds of messaging platforms that can be self hosted and have e2ee

        • x00z@lemmy.worldEnglish
          33·
          18 days ago

          I’m in a Discord server with 2000 members. You really want to encrypt and decrypt all incoming and outgoing messages 2000 times? There’s a reason why most E2EE messaging apps don’t really do that for group chats.

          • aksdb@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            16 days ago

            Depends on the usecase. If you don’t need chat history for new-joiners, you can work with a single key per group, rotating it whenever someone joins or leaves. Since the server broadcasts a „so-and-so has left/joined“ it might as well include the new key. That key is then used by everyone in the group, so you can still broadcast all messages and don’t have to encrypt them individually.

    • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      281·
      18 days ago

      Also completely new with no other contributors. Stay the fuck away from this until its been in development for a while and someone reviewed the code.

  • taco_shale032@lemmy.mlEnglish
    38·
    17 days ago

    Keep in mind that this project is likely vibe coded, or at least seems very AI assisted. (Copilot is mentioned in the .gitignore file and this was built by a single person in about 4 months) A bunch of security issues have already been opened.

    Edit: @[email protected] already mentioned this, my bad. 😄

  • HumanDent@lemmy.zipEnglish
    231·
    17 days ago

    While I appreciate the effort devs put into making open source alternatives to a closed source app, the naming convention is really starting to get irritating…

    Discord splits out to

    • Armcord
    • Legcord
    • Now Sharkord

    YouTube has

    • InnerTune
    • Which turned into OuterTune

    Libre-this, Libre-that, Libre-cock and balls.

    …I would love for devs to separate their software’s name just a little bit more from the thing they’re trying to replace. Please. Just be more unique. The name can still have a nod to what it’s replacing and not just be a partial modification to the original name.

    • MonkeMischief@lemmy.todayEnglish
      3·
      16 days ago

      Reminds me of the guy in that show Silicon Valley who was basically a plant / spy (Jianyang?), and his grand visions for all his apps were creatively named:

      “Chinese Facebook, Chinese Instagram, Chinese Twitter. . .”

      Lol

    • marud@piefed.marud.frEnglish
      9·
      18 days ago

      Tried a few months ago, the documentation for self hosting was lacking lots of info and now I can’t even find it…

      • Epzillon@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        17 days ago

        Yup, saw some stats from screenshots on there, their mail service had a cap of 300 mails monthly and it blew up to over 50 000. Verification/mail servers went up again yesterday at 4am CET but still seems like the authentication servers are pretty overrun.

    • zewm@lemmy.worldEnglish
      172·
      18 days ago

      The user experience for matrix is absolutely dog shit. Anyone who says otherwise is huffing copium.

      I have been setting up matrix servers and testing every desktop and mobile client. I cannot present this to my discord group as an alternative.

    • priapus@piefed.socialEnglish
      9·
      17 days ago

      Drop-in voice channels are a requirement for a discord alternative, Matrix does not have them. AFAIK you still need to call an entire channel to start a voice chat.

      • Furbag@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        17 days ago

        Im surprised as how many people discount this feature. Sometimes I sit in voice chat in my small Discord server alone for hours because nobody would show up if nobody was around.

        We’re all adults with jobs and responsibilities and shit, we don’t want to have to dial people in to shoot the shit late at night. That would feel like a chore.

        An alternative with no drop in voice chat is a non starter for my group.

        • priapus@piefed.socialEnglish
          4·
          17 days ago

          I think it comes from the fact that a lot of communities and projects use Discord basically like they would with IRC, with voice chats often not even existing in some servers. I have to assume the people who recommend Matrix are only ever in that kind of server.

          I’m in 2 or 3 servers with different friend groups and of course each one is full of friends of friends of friends. Even the smallest is over 30 people, but I only regularly join VC with 3-4. If I had to call all of them to be in a voice call I would literally never do it.

          Same goes for chats, in Matrix the closest things to channels and servers is rooms and spaces. The difference is that you don’t join a space, you just view rooms in the space and join them. Most of my servers have a ton of different channels for different things, I want to be able to see what happens in all of them without having to join each one, announcing to them that I’ve joined.

          I like Matrix for FOSS project discussions, but I don’t think it’ll ever be the right pick for just hanging out with friends.

  • MrMcGasion@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    18 days ago

    Haven’t had a chance to really look into it, but there’s also spacebar chat which is an open source selfhosted reimplementation of the discord backend that can be used with existing discord clients and bots and stuff. Which depending on how solid the rest of if is, could really help existing discord people move with less effort.

    • Shadow@lemmy.caEnglish
      83·
      18 days ago

      Based on what? A quick peek and I didn’t see any of the stuff I expect from LLMs

      • treadful@lemmy.zipEnglish
        8·
        18 days ago

        Less than a 4 month commit history and one dev. Not impossible maybe, but sure is suspect.

        • Natanox@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          63·
          18 days ago

          Absolutely not impossible for a skilled dev with lots of free time. This is still an Alpha after all.

          • treadful@lemmy.zipEnglish
            4·
            18 days ago

            Building the full stack of a functional real-time voice and video comms system as a lone dev is not a trivial undertaking.

            Even if they put 40/wk or more into it, I’d still be impressed. Like I said, not impossible but these people are rare.

            • greybeard@feddit.onlineEnglish
              3·
              18 days ago

              WebRTC is a thing. You don’t have to build all that from scratch. It’s very reasonable to piece together a lot of standard technologies to make this progress much quicker. I haven’t looked into this project, so I don’t know, but I know it was pretty trivial to setup a WebRTC app 10 years ago, which would appear to be a fully functioning video app.

          • douglasg14b@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            16 days ago

            Completely agree. If this is a skilled Dev who’s built products like this before and you can build something like this in your afternoons and weekends in like 6 months without LLM tool assistance.

            With basic assistance you can definitely cut that time down to 4 months or less easily.

            And if this is a full-time project, you can probably get it out the door in 1 to 2 months with llm assistance. (Not vibe coding, two very different things)

        • douglasg14b@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          16 days ago

          I’ve built projects of the size in 5-7 months before we had LLM or ML coding tools.

          With tabbed completion (Which most devs enjoy), and before full LLM code gen, 4-6 months.

          With llm assistance, not vibe coding, it’s possible to build projects like this in 1 to 2 months without sacrificing quality or safety. If you are an experienced engineer and have built projects like this before. A lot of these are boring, boilerplate, stuff.

          So the time spent doesn’t necessarily say that it’s vibe coded but if this is an inexperienced engineer then it very well might be and may be full of holes and issues.

        • Statick@feddit.onlineEnglish
          41·
          18 days ago

          I took a look. Didn’t seem vibe coded to me. Is there a specific area you looked at that looks vibe coded?

          • just_another_person@lemmy.worldBanned from communityEnglish
            819·
            18 days ago

            Here’s a very simple list of issues that any Node dev would immediately say is generated and has not been cleaned up:

            I mean I can keep going, but if you even glanced at this and didn’t IMMEDIATELY get it, you are bad at your job.

            Edit: This one is fucking hilarous

            • Statick@feddit.onlineEnglish
              192·
              18 days ago

              Your hostility confuses me. I’m not a node dev.

              I skimmed some of the server files and didn’t see the normal vibe coded slop I normally see in other languages and was genuinely curious what you saw.

              Thank you for your examples.

              • jckwik@discuss.onlineEnglish
                7·
                18 days ago

                It’s okay. I’ve got a few side projects in node and I also don’t see anything too out of the ordinary here. If anything this looks more like someone’s first project with some “make it work” rather than being perfect and pretty.

                I don’t understand the hostility. Even the bits that this guy talks about (duplicated code?) nothing looked duplicated - sure the names of the folders are the same but that’s more of a naming convention problem when you have a client that needs to connect to servers (or in this case has screens and functionality to connect to servers).

                And now I’ve probably spent more time and brainpower on this than I should have just because I was confused.

              • just_another_person@lemmy.worldBanned from communityEnglish
                136·
                18 days ago

                Then why if you aren’t familiar would you make a comment you didn’t see anything?

                Do you randomly walk into other people’s jobs with zero proficiency and speak to how they’re doing at it?

                • forrgott@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
                  193·
                  18 days ago

                  That’s it? That’s why you’re being such an arrogant prick?

                  Huh. You do you, I guess…

                  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

            • douglasg14b@lemmy.worldEnglish
              11·
              16 days ago

              Dude, my team members put out code that’s like this or worse on a regular basis that gets caught in PR review without using AI tooling…

              I’ve supported legacy projects that of course were built without tooling that didn’t exist. That are structured and written in ways that are far far worse than this.

              Nothing here screams vibe coated.

  • iamthetot@piefed.caEnglish
    3·
    17 days ago

    Thank you for sharing, this looks like it has potential and its brand new. Love you FOSS nerds.