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@cwebber
Would this be using Spritely (et al) tech? Also, what is wanted beyond what Matrix / XMPP provide?
@spritely

@cwebber @spritely https://nlnet.nl/funding.html @nlnet

@cwebber @spritely

https://elfaconsortium.eu/

They're being funded. Maybe ask for EU grant?

@cwebber @spritely have you considered a hybrid approach - using spritely for the capabilities & decentralisation, but layering Matrix on top for the CS API? Something we've been toying with is the idea of 'portable Matrix' to make it easier to hook up Matrix to entirely different underlying protocols, rather than folks reinventing their own apps & e2ee every time.

@spritely @cwebber Could you just use @matrix ? If you really want to build something, perhaps add federation to Mattermost !

@cwebber @spritely

https://zulip.com is a good open source alternative

@cwebber @spritely

discord is bad
a discord replacement will also be bad

who needs yet another garbage chat app

@cwebber @onepict @spritely Excellent. Will be following this development. I would love to assist from an appsec perspective if/when needed. We really need a good alternative.

@cwebber @spritely How is the devlopment looking as of now? Currently looking into Stoat for the time being but will have no issues moving again. Discord-esque chat platforms is the next big thing I'm missing from the fediverse right now.

@cwebber @spritely if it can be made as simple to install and run as Mastodon, then I could see it being a great opportunity. I’m advocating for hyper local installs as a way around age verification. https://www.empathyforward.org/2025/12/community-based-fediverse-instances/

My own FOSS efforts are focused on making this easier to manage.

@cwebber @spritely why wouldn’t Matrix be the natural replacement?

@cwebber @spritely just if possible try to avoid the major bug from both element (matrix), and simplex, that is losing the capacity to decrypt message because of a desyncronisation of some user on differents relay (server).

@cwebber @spritely In the meantime are there any half decent FOSS alternatives one could use as a stop-gap measure?

@cwebber @spritely why not a xmpp chatroom?

@cwebber @spritely Its so frustrating that all the other replacements should be good options, but they're not because they either don't work or have a difficult to use UX. If you end up doing this please make it usable 😭

@spritely @cwebber Can you help Zulip achieve this (and fix their conversation thread model)? 🥺

@cwebber @spritely is it going to be a new protocol or maybe build on top of xmpp or matrix?

@cwebber @spritely How much funding is significant and how much is too little?

@cwebber @spritely What is going on with Discord? why does EVERYONE use it?

I don't even know what it is LOL