Update 22/2/26: After a brief stint shutting down the XMPP server and running a Matrix server, I’ve decided against hosting a Matrix server and am swapping back to XMPP, due to a mix of performance reasons (I had to move my Minecraft server off to different drives due to the sheer I/O bandwidth Matrix was using) and also due to a myriad of privacy concerns. Additionally, I’ve moved the XMPP server from xmpp.dralnah.com to just dralnah.com, in an attempt to avoid some confusion.

Click here to get to the actual info a bit more quickly.

An Unfortunate Reminder of Reality

On February 2nd, 2026, Discord announced it was going to be requiring ID verification in order to access some of its features, particularly NSFW/18+ channels, among other things. Similar limitations have been required of social media platforms (and while the argument can be made Discord isn’t a social media platform, at this point it basically is) in the UK, for example, where a law was passed last year that required social media companies to use facial recognition technology or ID scans in order to access social media. While this sort of policy is often positioned as a means to keep children safe on sites, that view is often a smokescreen, and I believe it is here, as well.

Discord is one of the preeminent social platforms on the internet, particularly among the gaming space but also for many other communities, mostly due to its ease of use and free access. However, the centralization of such a large group of people on a single social media platform has the unintended consequences of people talking about a lot of private subjects and personal matters in DMs or small Discord servers, having private calls, posting personal art, or in some cases people use Discord as a sort of personal file server. Discord has access to many peoples’ very private and personal data. Discord is where I get the vast majority of my interpersonal interactions these days, in all honesty. I’ve met and talk to long-distance partners on there.

As a company under capitalism, they don’t care about what happens to that data in the slightest. They care about money.

The problem with Discord having access to all of this information and not caring about it is a lot of other entities do care about it, quite a lot. One of the not-so-well kept secrets about business is that if a service is being offered for free, you’re not the customer; you’re the product. Discord states that it does not sell its information to advertisers; it may not know who you are, but it has a username and likely an IP address (it’s nearly impossible to completely mask your IP address on the internet and frankly, most people don’t even try). Discord itself has generally stated it doesn’t sell your data (a statement I just don’t trust), but it certainly keeps enough information on you to give you an end-of-year recap. Even if your data isn’t being sold by Discord directly, their servers aren’t secure: every few months Discord has a data breach that reveals thousands of profiles, along with any data Discord has on them, including government-issued IDs in the case of the UK, along with potentially private photos. Additionally, having data that’s so easy to scrape means yet another avenue for AI bots to begin scraping personal data to fuel their data sets, and while I won’t get into why I don’t like AI here (many of these topics intertwine with each other), I don’t like it. Not at all.

Discord also openly declares they’ll work with law enforcement in many cases. While I used to not have as much of an issue with this, I live in the United States, and increasingly am seeing a government that is discriminatory and willing to arrest and deport its own citizens due to race, sexual preference, or gender identity. I am profoundly worried for people I know who are trans, black, latino, or otherwise marginalized, some of which have been unfortunate enough to live rather close to the ICE raids in Minneapolis. There’s even more concerns I have regarding staying so heavily on Discord, but that wraps up the basics. On some level or another a lot of these concerns have been on my mind much of the past few years, and it’s part of the reason I wanted to set up a little server for myself in the first place.

So… Where To?

So, that covers why I don’t like Discord. Why self-hosting a server though?

I’ve been on the internet in some form or another more than half my life at this point, and this isn’t the first time I’ve had to change primary social media platforms. I was on Facebook for a few years before getting annoyed at the turn towards promoting conservative media and rage-baiting, and left. That was before all the data collecting stories began. I left Tumblr mostly because they banned NSFW content in 2018 and frankly a lot of my friends left the platform. I shuffled to Reddit, before realizing how much of the site was just promoting things for you to buy and pointless arguments and hopping off of that. Twitter started a slow spiral to its death even before Elon Musk bought it, though he hardly helped.

The point being, I’m tired of hopping on free sites, building up a little community I enjoy, then having the rug pulled out from under me and panicking while I figure out where all my friends are going, losing some and following others to yet another doomed platform. This isn’t some impossible, endless cycle; it’s possible to keep communities alive and happy, and quite easy in all honesty. But it’s not profitable, as many social media site managers and owners are finding out. I’ll do the generic plug of one Dr. Cory Doctorow and his term “enshittification” here.

Unfortunately, you can’t make these sorts of communities for free. It takes resources and effort to sustain communities. Servers. Electricity. These things cost time to set up, and money to buy, and corporations can’t just give it to you for free. That’s why they often resort to heavy advertising, or in lieu of that, they resort to selling your data to advertisers or whoever else is interested.

One thing I’ve realized over the past few years, especially after moving to Linux, is that I actually kinda like this web admin stuff. I like playing with computers, getting to figure out how to fit things together. I have a house and a server and electricity and can afford it, as well as some knowledge and a lot of stubbornness for these things, so I’m gonna use it.

If you’re tired of being pushed around to different servers and see this, you’re welcome to ask for access.

What Are You Hosting?

I’m going to try to offer a roughly equivalent suite of things to what Discord provides, with some caveats; I typically try to host open-source alternative programs, for a myriad of reasons I really need to get around to explaining some time, but I won’t do here. And I’m not a programmer, just a web admin, so I can’t add functionality to programs that just don’t have them, only make programs talk to each other.

I’m going to offer an XMPP server; XMPP is basically just a text messaging protocol, and the same sort of tech that WhatsApp uses. The server itself is called ejabberd It’s entirely open source, and the sevrer I’m using is open source and more or less open license, so we never have to worry about a company fucking it up. Users can message each other, or can set up larger (temporary) chat rooms, or they can join one of the permanent chat rooms I set up. I don’t have the hard drive space to accommodate the sort of permanent archiving of photos and messages that Discord does, but I’ll try to keep it archived for a few days at least. XMPP offers the following:

• An instant messaging service with device-level, peer-to-peer encryption (if desired); nobody except you can read your messages when using encryption.
• A place to send media, so a pseudo-file server (hopefully; still figuring that out)
• Group messaging services (impermanent and permanent, public chat rooms)
• The ability to connect to other XMPP servers people make, so you can talk to people on servers all over the world (if you can, make your own!)

And things I eventually plan to offer:

• A social media site based off of the XMPP server via Movim. This can hook into other XMPP servers that are running Movim, so you can follow blogs from around the world!
• A small video chat tool via Galene or something similar; this may be replaced later on if XMPP clients pick up the slack and allow multi-person video calls.
• A private streaming server; depending on my capabilities and bandwidth I may or may not open this up to other people, privately, on a person-by-person basis.

And the things I can’t offer:

• Custom emotes/stickers/badges, emotes, etc; you can post pictures and depending on the client you pick maybe gifs work, but there’s nothing I can do about the clients/servers not supporting these features. Like I said, I put things together, I don’t build them up from scratch
• A massive community; I just don’t have the means to host thousands of people, especially on the dinosaur of a server that’s running in my basement. But I can probably host a ton doing text chat at once, maybe a dozen or so chatting on video/voice

How Can I Join?

I’m intentionally keeping this server private; this is primarily to avoid bots, who tend to flood servers like this. That being said, I’m happy to have just about anybody I’ve met or has someone who can vouch for them here. I work full time and can’t be playing whack-a-bot constantly. If you’d like to join and I know you personally, you’re absolutely welcome to join; please send an email to webmaster@dralnah.com or message me via whatever other means you have available to contact me, with the following information:

• The username you want to use on the server
• (Optionally,) your preferred password. If a password is not supplied I’ll give you a temporary one and can change it at any time.

How Do I Actually Use The Server?

You’ll need an XMPP Client; I recommend picking from the group here or here. There’s clients for web browsers, Android, iOS, and every main desktop OS. Please take care and look at if the particular client you chose is still being updated, is available for your operating system, and has the features you’re looking for, as some don’t support calling, etc. If you’re stuck with decision paralysis or don’t want to think about it, try Gajim; it seems to be fine. It’s likely worth noting that Fluux Messenger has shown to have some issues working with my server, strangely; if you’re having trouble with it, try another chat client. When you go to log in, you’ll need the following:

• Your Username: [username]@dralnah.com (yes, you need to type the full thing out)
• Your Password

Once you log on, you’re more or less set. We’ll have several public (notably unencrypted) chats, which you may be able to discover based on your client. If you can’t, just join general@dralnah.com and we can point you to some of the other ones. You can also join public chats from any other XMPP server out there that’s open and federated; take a look around!

Besides the public chats, you may start a conversation with anybody in the server, privately, and encrypted. You should also be able to start your own private group chats, also encrypted (depending on everybody’s clients). Notably, private group chats are destroyed when everybody leaves them as well. Images are supported, but embeds are typically not; you can upload any file up to 10MB, and the server is set up to keep several gigabytes of files from every user before it starts to delete the oldest content. I should note that this is not intended to be used as a permanent file server; please store your files elsewhere, but I’m happy to host temporary storage or facilitate file transfers. If you need permanent file storage, please message me about it.

If any of this seems too confusing, please let me know. I want to try and get as many of my friends on here as possible, but I recognize that this sort of shift of platform is hard, especially when it’s me sitting here trying to hold together the tech with string. But I really do want to eventually mostly move off of Discord and onto this, and it’d be a shame to lose contact with most of my friends again after 10 years on Discord with them.

I love you all, take care of yourselves.

Dralnah