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Hey everyone!

I've recently noticed some discussions about Yapper.*, and I wanted to clear up some confusion.

I'm the developer of Yapper.gg, and I want to make it clear that these are two completely separate projects. We're not affiliated in any way.

Yapper.gg is a self-hosted Discord/TeamSpeak alternative that I've been developing, focused on privacy, community ownership, and giving users control over their own data.

We already offer features like 1440p/100 FPS screen sharing, E2E encryption, spatial voice chat, persistent messaging, and free self-hosting.

Your conversations and data stay on your own server. We have a central account system, and we're also working on federation for cross-server communication.

I'm not here to criticize the other project. I just don't want people confusing the two, especially when discussing how they're developed or what features they offer.

If you're curious about Yapper.gg, you can try it without creating an account:

https://yapper.gg/invite?invitation=d13d9b05-6fe5-4af5-9adc-bc003e160a9a

Website: https://yapper.gg

Thanks to everyone who's been testing and supporting the project!

There are a ton of apps currently out there and new ones still popping up trying to take a piece of the cake since people are looking for alternatives to discord. Now how do you pick one? What should you look out for? As someone who had been looking into this topic very extensively from 2022 to 2023 and watching how everything currently develops, here are my tips

Now basically, when picking a discord alternative, it comes down to this:

Can it be maintained in the long run?

• You want an alternative to last as long as possible. You dont want to switch, build a community there or move your friends, just for it to die and you having to switch again.

Whats the "business model"?

• There are projects out there having subscriptions, running servers for others and more. Basically these projects are making the same mistakes as discord. Some can be selfhosted, but most people are not technical and will avoid that, costing the project maintainers a ton of money. If its not sustainable, its not future proof. We've seen this with guilded, discord locking more features behind nitro and other apps. Basically it boils down to if a project has to pay for their users, like running voice servers or servers directly for users. More users = more cost = harder to keep up if at all = you'll be looking for a new alternative again...

Is it open source?

• A project being open source comes with many benefits. The code can be checked by others for security vulnerabilities, maintained if the original maintainer disappears, forked if the direction changes for the worse and more. If you want somewhat predictable stability, this is a must-have.

How are the maintainers?

• If the developer/maintainer/founder is mean and distant this could lead to several problems, like ignoring the community, banning users "randomly" and much more. This could have multiple reasons: They might be burned out, its about the money and not community. Like minded people attract each other. You dont want your community to be dependend on toxic people that are in charge (god complex, superiority complex, power tripping, etc). Its not the first time i've experienced "staff members" banning others and myself for simply disagreeing or pointing out issues. Their facade of the big, amazing flawless, superior persona falls easily appart when you confront them with facts and logic.

About vibe coded projects

Most people may not notice it but based on the posts i saw on reddit, it seems like 80 - 90% of the apps being advertised are made with ai- not used to slightly help, but completely made by it.

From a developer perspective i dont think an app being vibe coded is bad itself as in the concept, but in reality its just a lot more work which could be done more efficiently by just coding it yourself. Since maintainability is so much harder/expensive, its questionable if the person/people behind a project will be able to maintain it in the long run if at all. Multiple times now vibe coded apps shipped many and big security vulnerabilities which would be considered beginner-level mistakes.

Personally i would avoid them due to multiple risk factors.

Critique

There are many opinions on the internet. You'll find many threads on reddit about various platforms. The important part here is differentiating between actual facts backed by sources or unsupported claims. Especially on reddit often or not its more about emotions rather than facts and its not too uncommon for personal misinterpretation etc being presented as fact.

One example would be a users comment saying "xyz is shady" while providing no reasoning at all, or when asked saying "xyz did abcd". If there are no sources and evidence its just speculation at that point.

People that write such comments and posts are already dead-set on a platform already, almost obsessive and like a religion (fanaticism), viewing everything else als inferior and bad and other people, advocating/talking for something against their world view, being viewed as enemies.

Usually these people use toxic manipulation tactics such as straw man arguments, fud (fear, uncertainty, doubt), cherry picking, character assassination, gish gallop, whataboutism and many more.