this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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Until it's just as bad. Just move to Stoat (formerly Revolt) or Fermi.chat and save yourself the headache of another centralized platform going to shit.
I tried to set one up but a bunch of people had trouble even signing up. I'm finding Element (Matrix) is less troublesome so far.
Or Matrix, which is federated.
It's decentralized, not federated I thought...? Are there other services that use the Matrix protocol?
Federated means that different servers can talk to each other and decentralized means that there is no server.
There is also nothing stopping someone from using the Matrix protocol to create another service, though I don't know of one that exists.
no, it means there's no central server. You still need a Matrix server to handle communications, but there's no "central matrix server", the servers discover each other based on a baked-in "known good" server list + ad-hoc discovery (e.g. if a server has a group chat with a member of a server your server doesn't know yet, and you join that group chat, your server and the unknown one exchange metadata and so on).
You just described federation.
No, this is called decentralisation.
Federation would be the exchange of rules, policies, blocklists, etc., beyond the ability of servers to talk to each other.
As someone else said, stoat isnt federated. It also doesnt have E2EE. Meaning in practice, you are still using a centralized service that can enshitify. You could self host, but your friends aren't going to switch to your small self hosted instance if everyone is on the central server.
Neither of those have working audio channels yet right?
I've been following Stoat, their documentation states that self hosted voice channels don't work (I think their official server does though), and also you have to recompile their client software to hard code the link to your server.
That feels so much like niche coder hobbyist hurdles that I really doubt people en masse would make the switch by themselves.
Yeah I'm really hoping they just add a button in the client to connect to a custom server (like how Bitwarden works), as well as actually update the self hosting images and instructions. I've been keeping tabs on them for almost a year now, and still no progress on that front.
Oh yeesh. Sounds like it's got a good way to go before regular use becomes viable
Stoat seems to, though I've not actually tested it. But my system audio devices showed up in the browser client as inputs, so that's a good sign that something is there.
You can self host Teamspeak and the self hosted version at least has voice chat unlike Stoat.