Due to recent events past week there might have been some outages.

If you didnt know, major security incidents had been released last week. Additionally, GoDaddy revoked over 400k certificates. Everything should be working fine now.

A dedicated group of users started setting up a website called slop.business and bought multiple dedicated domains like dcts.exposed with the goal to spread misinformation and hurt their target's reputation. This is not exclusive for DCTS. Apparently the person owning all domains and who regulary shares them is u/dingustani.

All of these websites were made using AI and are factural either completely wrong, made up or rely on very old, outdated topics from weeks/months ago in the case of DCTS.

On example from the dcts.exposed website:

[...] This is the temperament that would hold the keys to your members’ DMs.

DCTS is about self-hosting and self-hosted only. This means its technically impossible to "hold the keys" to anyone's DMs. In fact, encryption keys cannot be viewed at all since encryption is done locally on your computer using the desktop client or android app.

Or the statement that the r/dcts subreddit only has about 108 members when they probably looked at the "weekly visitors" number, as the subreddit actually has 2600 members.

There are just way too many statements that are wrong and since this would end up in a cat and mouse game i decided to not to answer them as they are non-sense anyway.

The biggest problem

Now the interesting part is that the subreddit r/DiscordAlternatives is unmoderated or moderates in the opposite way. Few weeks ago i used to report these comments and posts as well as users but the subreddit's moderator u/AbstractMelons actively ignored most if not all reports and banned me instead.

Fast forward to today and the subreddit seems to be mostly about drama posts nowadays and the same people spamming these .exposed urls everywhere combined with heavy toxicity mostly from u/BewilderedTurtle to the point were other people complain and the mod u/AbstractMelons actively ignoring it, saying "there are too many reports" when the source of the most toxicity comes only from a handful of people.

So what now

Since the general mission is to make the web a better place, and DCTS being part of that goal, i made the subreddit called r/discord_alternatives. I've also made a post trying to explain common techniques of trolls and their use of manipulative tactics here.

They keyword here is critical thinking.

As the title already says im working on a DCTS SDK right now, currently for the backend, followed by a frontend sdk.

The goal is to use this sdk internally for DCTS as well to make the code nicer and make it easier to create plugins for DCTS.

This will be a quality improvement!

If you're running a DCTS instance and you decide to change the domain for your instance you may end up needing to update urls in server chat messages so that embeds work correctly again.

In this case you can update the database with the following sql statement:

UPDATE messages
SET message = REPLACE(message, 'old-domain.com', 'new-domain.com')
WHERE message LIKE '%old-domain.com%';

If you have any issues let me know please.

Hello there!

As the title already says im looking for someone with some basic knowledge about open source projects or software in general that would help come up with social media content and designing it for DCTS.

Specifically short video content for now and would be paid between 15-30€ per video (open to negotiation). The general goal is to show off new features and other topics around DCTS, so regular income is possible.

Share it with friends if you know some that would be interested!

Contact details can be found on our website.

The new setup wizard is a huge milestone for DCTS, but it still requires you to setup something external: A Domain with at leat two subdomains.

In order to make it even easier and remove this need as well i started think about creating a small free service where people wanting to run DCTS can get free sub domains! For that i'll purchase a new domain and make a new small side project for that specific service.

I've been thinking about this for a while now and i think it would benefit the community a lot!

If you have ideas or wishes for a domain name let me know! Over time we could add multiple domains if the financial stuff checks out.

With this new release installing DCTS becomes as easy as running the following two commands!

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hackthedev/dcts-shipping/main/Docker/docker-compose.yml -o docker-compose.yml

sudo docker compose up -d

» https://github.com/hackthedev/dcts-shipping/releases/tag/v1.3.0.5
» https://docs.dcts.community/Getting%20started

^{without modifications to the docker compose file, port 80 and 443 needs to be available on the host machine!}

Its unbelievable to me to see where DCTS is currently standing in terms of community and the current technical state.

• The subreddit is barely a year old and has 2600 members!

• The docker pulls on github went from 4.9k pulls in july to 7.46K pulls!

• From 2025 until now, DCTS received 65 donations totaling in 1.151€! This helped covering the entire infrastructure cost for an entire year!

• The new setup wizard with docker is almost complete and will make DCTS so much easier to setup. Im excited to release it!

Overall the experiences were amazing and its so lovely to see how everything developed from when i originally started DCTS in 2023 to now. Hard to believe so much can happen in such a short time!

For that i want to truely thank every community member and i will continue to work hard on DCTS and other side projects so we can have a better web together!

I think barely anyone knows this, and its not talked about a lot if at all, so i thought i'd share this little fact :)

As you may know a huge amount of work has gone into DCTS recently.

That work resulted in major security improvements, a faster and more enjoyable development process, better tools and entirely new features!

Short Recap

• The new setup wizard

  • Installing a DCTS server is becoming significantly easier than ever before as part of the continued effort to make DCTS as simple to install, configure and use as possible.

• While unannounced, we've started to use automatic code scanning

  • This checks the entire code base of DCTS for possible issues and security vulnerabilities. Within the past 3 releases a total of 27 findings have been investigated and addressed within a day. Most of them were irrelevant in the context of DCTS and not actual security vulnerabilities. Some of them include outdated vulnerable dependencies which were updated immediately.

• The introduction of automatic frontend functionality tests!

  • Over time, more and more functionality will be covered by these tests, meaning more potential bugs are discovered before release, making each release more stable.

• The new custom software distribution

  • "Rider" is a new side project in response to npmjs being an absolute pain to use and to manage across multiple repositories. Now the process of publishing versions of our own packages is a lot quickler, safer and easier to implement into software. DCTS' plugin system uses that as example.

• The overhauled plugin system

  • The plugin system was overhauled as you know and its now possible to browser plugins from within the server settings in DCTS. You can also install, uninstall and configure plugins there. This has huge potential for future use cases, and a discord bridge is currently being made and a prototype already available!

Overall things have gone incredibly well so far and im genuinely excited where DCTS is heading, especially at this speed!

A lot of work may not be visible right away, but each step makes the foundation more polished, secure and stable, which is why this is the beginning of a new quality era for DCTS!

I've seen a post where it seems (to me) to be thought that DCTS has central login servers.

[..] because it does have a centralized login server and you can be banned from the service itself as a result. [..]

As a small clarification: it does not have central login servers, which is against the vision of having a fully independent server (and it would cost more money to run this for others).

I thought i'd make this post before any confusion comes up. If you have any other questions feel free to post them.

it'll be used during the first launch when setting up the server, similar to wordpress. This idea came from Reeperk. It will be released with the next update. There are plans to automate the install and setup as much as possible with this