Building your way out

I built a Discord replacement in a day

Discord announced global age verification last week. Face scans or government IDs. If you don't comply, you get locked into what they call a "teen-appropriate experience." Approximately nobody was excited about this.

Then it got worse. Users in the UK started seeing prompts from a company called Persona, one of Discord's age verification vendors. Persona's lead investor across its last two funding rounds is Founders Fund. That's Peter Thiel's venture fund. Thiel co-founded Palantir, the surveillance company that builds tracking infrastructure for ICE.

That's who Discord is experimenting with to verify your face.

I read all this and had a pretty simple reaction. I don't want to be on a platform that requires me to scan my face for a company funded by a surveillance architect. And I don't want my friends on it either.

So I built something.

What I built

Le Faux Pain is a self-hostable voice and text chat server. Think Discord, but you own it. One Go binary, one SQLite database, no external services. Text channels with replies, reactions, mentions, image uploads. Voice channels powered by WebRTC. Works in any browser. There's a native desktop client built with Tauri if you want that too.

I built the whole thing in one day with Claude.

That's the part I keep coming back to. One day. A full-featured chat platform with voice, text, file uploads, user auth, and a desktop client. One person, one AI, one afternoon that stretched into an evening.

The real story

Five years ago this would have taken a team months. I know because I've been building software for a long time and I remember what the pace used to be. Now I can describe what I want, iterate on it in real time, and ship something that works by dinner.

This isn't a flex. It's the actual state of things. The tools available to a single person right now are absurd. Claude wrote Go, TypeScript, and Rust across the server, client, and desktop app. I directed, tested, course-corrected, and made architecture decisions. The collaboration felt like working with a fast expert engineer who never gets tired and knows every library.

The point isn't that AI is cool. The point is that the power to build alternatives to extractive platforms is now available to basically anyone who can describe what they want.

Why this matters

Discord is a free product. You're not the customer. The PC Gamer article about the Thiel connection lays out the specifics, but the pattern is older than Discord. A platform grows, your community depends on it, and then the platform starts making decisions you'd never agree to. By then you're locked in. Cmon, we all know this play.

The answer has always been self-hosting. Run your own thing, own your own data. The problem was it used to be genuinely hard to build something worth using. That barrier is collapsing.

Le Faux Pain runs on a $5/month VPS. You clone the repo, build it, point your domain at it, and you have a private chat server with voice that you control completely. No face scans. No surveillance vendors. Your community stays yours. Not an asset in someone's portfolio. Not a node in some plot for geopolitical reordering that finds cages for people who look or think like you.

Bring your friends

The code is MIT licensed and on GitHub. You can run it as-is or fork it and make it your own. The architecture is simple on purpose. Go backend, SolidJS frontend, SQLite for storage, Pion for WebRTC. One binary to deploy.

I'm not saying everyone needs to run their own chat server. I'm saying you can. And if the platform you're on starts requiring face scans processed by companies tied to surveillance infrastructure, maybe you should.

The thing that's different now is that "build it yourself" is no longer advice reserved for people with engineering teams. It's Tuesday afternoon advice. It's "I'm annoyed at Discord" advice.

More soon.