meowcord is a self-hosted discord clone with feature parity, e2e encryption and federation.
it serves a custom patched Discord web client with Equicord from a local copy and rebrands that client as your instance. anyone can sign up on your instance, log in with the real Discord UI and use it the way they use Discord, without a Discord account.
you can also join servers, group chats, and add friends from other instances, as long as they're running meowcord and have their instance verified.
meowcord is currently in very early alpha. right now, it's a big mess and not recommended for production use or anything other than testing. during this alpha, we'll also have an extremely permissive ai contribution policy, so that we can get as many people as possible to test it and contribute to it. else, we'd never get anywhere near discord feature parity.
since meowcord is federated, no matter what instance you pick, you'll always be able to talk to anybody else, even on other instances :3
start by picking an instance from this list and signing up. you can find servers to join in the Discovery tab.
follow the setup guide for Docker, local development and the source archive. to run without Docker, the native Linux guide sets the server up as a dedicated meowcord user with systemd, local PostgreSQL and an HTTPS reverse proxy, and covers voice, operator access, backups and updates. the server supports PostgreSQL and SQLite.
for Docker, copy .env.example to .env, set your instance domain, PostgreSQL password and public voice address, then run:
docker compose up -d --buildafter registering your operator account, grant it access locally using its numeric account ID: docker compose exec server bun scripts/ops/operator.mjs grant <account-id>. the first signup is an ordinary account. see the alpha guide for local provisioning and revocation.
to get your instance listed in instances.md and in global discovery, read the verification guide.
AI contributions are allowed during the alpha. please read CONTRIBUTING.MD for development conventions and verification commands, and open an issue or pull request for bugs and improvements.
AGPL-3.0-only, see LICENSE. Code inherited from before this fork is by Spacebar and its contributors.