this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
97 points (99.0% liked)

Selfhosted

56208 readers
819 users here now

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:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. 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.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

  7. 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!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
ruud@lemmy.world
Loki@lemmy.world
CannaVet@lemmy.world
devve@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.hybridsarcasm.xyz
97
GitHub - spacebarchat/spacebarchat: πŸ“¬ Spacebar is a free open source selfhostable discord compatible communication platform (github.com)
submitted 2 hours ago by moonpiedumplings@programming.dev to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
20 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Has anyone tried this? It's discord reverse engineered.

top 20 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 3 points 9 minutes ago* (last edited 7 minutes ago)

I set this container up yesterday. Technically it's running. But all the settings are in the fucking sql db, and I know fuck all about sql other than drop tables is funny meme from xkcd. But also, ignoring the settings, I would like to point out that there is effectively no client. I mean, there are two official ones - the depreciated one, and the alpha one, and the alpha one has a total of 4 releases with the newest being two years ago. How do you deprecate a client when the server is still in alpha? What the fuck? And on all pages it screams 'this is alpha testing software, do not use as a daily'. Also the docs are, uhh... rough. If rough was falling 4 stories into a bed of poisonous cacti. It took me 3 hours to get the container running properly and finally poking at the db. It's as organized as my bedroom ('it's somewhere in this dresser, I think...').

The idea, the potential, is brilliant. Literally everything about getting it working though...

[–] ulkesh@piefed.social 1 points 9 minutes ago

Doesn't seem terribly well-maintained.

[–] CoreLabJoe@piefed.ca 20 points 1 hour ago (2 children)

HHhhmm... Do container/docker install option. This is why it's probably stagnated in adoption from the selfhosted community.

It needs a container based install, no one likes installing dependencies and crud onto their pristine environments any longer.

[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 10 points 1 hour ago

It’s weird that the server has a .dockerignore file without a Dockerfile.

[–] tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden 9 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

It's just not mentioned prominently https://github.com/spacebarchat/docker

[–] hexagonwin@lemmy.today 5 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

last commit 3yrs ago.. seems unmaintained

[–] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 25 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (2 children)

Docker compose's don't really need to be maintained though. As long as the app doesn't need new components old docker composes should work.

EDIT: Oops, it does look like spacebarchat's docker images have last been updated over 2 years ago:

https://hub.docker.com/r/spacebarchat/server

EDIT2: Although this is outdated, I think their github repo has an action to autobuild docker images on pushes. Still investigating.

EDIT3: Okay, they don't seem to be actually ran.

But using nix to build a docker image is pretty cool.

EDIT4: Oh shit, the docker image build workflows were added just 2 hours ago. Of course they haven't been ran!

Docker support soon, probably.

[–] Railcar8095@lemmy.world 15 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

You got my heart racing with the twists!

[–] Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 1 points 27 minutes ago

Right? Reading that was like watching an action movie!

[–] rudyharrelson@lemmy.radio 5 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Perhaps more relevantly, the Docker image itself has not been updated in over 2 years: https://hub.docker.com/r/spacebarchat/server

[–] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 4 points 1 hour ago

Faster than my edits, I see.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 3 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Decentralized (no abuse of power and doesn't have a single point of failure)

There is a direct server though, is it federated? The readme doesn't say it's federated at all

[–] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 3 points 1 hour ago (2 children)

It's not federated, just easy to self host and point custom clients at.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 1 points 18 minutes ago

That's too bad, that's a hard line for me, it has to have the option of federation.

Also, so it's a direct server, so it is centralized, there's nothing decentralized about it

[–] Lumisal@lemmy.world 2 points 50 minutes ago

Are you sure? Because they also seem to be behind Fermi which sounds federated

[–] nfreak@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 hours ago (3 children)

Interesting, seems like this has been around for a while but I haven't heard of it until now. With how much Discord's shitting the fan and becoming (well, always has been) a privacy nightmare, this seems worth a try. The alternatives out there either need time to mature (Stoat) or don't really fill the same role (Matrix).

[–] lemming@anarchist.nexus 4 points 45 minutes ago

shitting the fan

Huh, like a more disastrous and direct combo-approach. I like it.

[–] Lemmchen@feddit.org 4 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Spacebar was called Fosscord before. Maybe you have heard of that.

[–] mrnobody@reddthat.com 4 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Never heard of it either. Will check out cuz initially sounded like some vibecode app to quickly replace Discord since the news.

[–] wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 1 points 3 minutes ago

It's been around a few years. I investigated it last year. It had a name change some times ago.

I can't vouch for the code quality, but it's too old to be slop.