Shadewire · chat
Private communication,
unobserved.
Servers, channels, roles and voice — the shape you already know, running on a backend we host ourselves. No ads, no profiling, no third party holding the conversation.
Capabilities
Everything the shape needs. Nothing that watches you.
Servers & channels
Communities with text channels, categories and permissions. Roles carry colour and capability, so moderation is delegated rather than centralised on one account.
Voice
Real-time voice channels backed by a self-hosted LiveKit SFU. Audio is relayed by our own selective forwarding unit rather than a hosted voice vendor.
Clients
A browser client that installs as a PWA, a native Windows desktop app with notifications, tray and silent auto-update, and an Android build. Get the apps
Uploads
Attachments up to 50 MB on web, stored in our own object store. Files over the limit can be compressed in place rather than silently rejected.
Membership
Invite-only. Accounts are issued by the operator, so the member list is a set of people someone vouched for rather than whoever found the URL.
Architecture
Where a message actually goes.
Every stage below is a service running on Shadewire hardware. Nothing in this path is rented from a communications provider.
Client
Shadewire ingress
Application services
Private datastore
Voice takes a shorter path
Voice traffic is handled by a dedicated ingress and a LiveKit SFU on the same estate. Audio is relayed by our own infrastructure instead of a hosted voice vendor.
Self-hosting means the failure modes are ours too. When something here breaks, it is one person fixing it — not a status page and a support queue.
Access
You need an invitation.
Installing a client does not get you in — accounts are issued by the operator. If you don't have an invite yet, apply and tell us how you know us.
Already a member
Open Shadewire
Sign in from any browser, or install a client for notifications and background delivery.
Open source
Built on work we didn't write
Shadewire Chat runs on Stoat, an open-source chat platform, which is itself a fork of Revolt. The server software, the protocol and the client foundations are their authors' work, and the credit for them is theirs.
What Shadewire adds is the deployment: a self-hosted backend on our own hardware, a custom-branded desktop client, an Android build, and the network the whole thing runs across. We do not claim authorship of the upstream projects.