Kizuna

Project Overview

Kizuna (絆, meaning "bond" or "connection") is a self-hosted alternative to Discord. It gives communities a place to talk in real time — text channels, direct messages, voice channels, and screen sharing — without handing their conversations to a third party. You run the server, and you own every message and file that passes through it.

The name says it all: it is about the bond between the people in a community, not the platform sitting in the middle.

Core Features

• Real-time text chat — channels, direct messages, typing indicators, and @mentions (@everyone, @here, and per-user)
• Voice channels — powered by WebRTC through a mediasoup SFU, with per-channel audio quality controls
• Screen sharing — share your screen inside a voice channel from the desktop client
• Custom roles & permissions — granular control over who can send messages, manage channels, delete messages, kick members, and manage invites
• File uploads & attachments — images, video, audio, PDFs, and more, with drag-and-drop
• Invite codes — generate join links with usage limits, expiry, and QR codes
• Cross-server — connect to multiple self-hosted Kizuna servers from a single client

Own Your Data

Every Kizuna server is yours. Messages, uploads, and member data live on your hardware, in a database and a file store that you control. There is no central company in the loop reading your chats, building a profile, or changing the rules on you overnight.

Key benefits include:

• Complete ownership of your community's conversations and files
• Freedom from ads, tracking, and account requirements you did not choose
• The ability to set your own rules and moderation policies
• Independence from platform changes, outages, or shutdowns

Deployment

Kizuna is built to be genuinely easy to run. A single docker compose up -d pulls pre-built, multi-architecture images (amd64 and arm64 — yes, a Raspberry Pi works) and brings the whole stack online with automatic HTTPS via Caddy. No compiler or build tools required on the server itself.

Note: For voice and screen sharing, a small range of UDP ports needs to be reachable through your firewall — WebRTC handles the media directly for low latency.

Updates are just as simple: docker compose pull && docker compose up -d, with an optional Watchtower service that applies new releases automatically within the hour.

The Desktop Client

Alongside the web app, Kizuna ships a native desktop client built with Tauri v2, available for Windows, macOS (Apple Silicon), and Linux. It adds background notifications, auto-updates, and screen sharing — the things that make a chat app feel like part of your desktop rather than another browser tab.

Get Involved

Kizuna is fully open-source and available on GitHub. It is under active development, so feedback and contributions are very welcome — whether that is reporting a cross-platform WebRTC quirk, suggesting a feature, or submitting a pull request.

If you have ever wanted a chat platform that answers to your community instead of a corporation, give Kizuna a try and let me know what you think.