While looking for Discord alternatives I came across this project which looks like a great alternative for the kinds of Discord servers centered around Open Source projects and organizations. Ones where live chat and voice rooms aren’t the focus.
It’s a combination of forums and knowledge base that would be perfect for this use case.
Love this… Will take a spin for my OpenAstra
Mind, seems to be vibecoded.
Hey 👋 creator of storyden here! it’s a labour of love that started long before “vibecode” was a word, almost 4 years ago now! I do use some language-model tooling now, but not anywhere close to blind-push-to-prod “vibe coding” :)
So?
It’s 2026, being vibecoded is a self-explanatory problem.
Well, I have seen so many classic coders write shitty unmaintainable and insecure code that I don’t think that NOT being vibe coded mean anything.
It’s like the difference bewteen publicly-traded and privately-owned companies. Publicly-traded companies are guaranteed to enshittify due to fiduciary duty. Privately-owned companies could enshittify, but it’s not guaranteed.
A human programmer could be shit but at least they’re not guaranteed to be shit like the vibe coding AI
I like the analogy…
But at the end of the day better to have something that starts shitty but can be improved over time rather than nothing.
If it stays shitty, then it’s just shit and won’t go anywhere.
And how is it supposed to get less shit if it’s vibe coded? The programmer didn’t learn anything when making the initial build
This looks … great.
I find it strange that they themselves have a Discord link in the footer.
Because it’s not for replacing discord it’s a modern version of phpbb or vbulliten forums, the OP mentions this
Ones where live chat and voice rooms aren’t the focus.
It’s a combination of forums and knowledge base that would be perfect for this use case.
looks like a great alternative for the kinds of Discord servers
That is correct. However, OP says right before:
a great alternative for the kinds of Discord servers centered around Open Source projects and organizations
That’s because it aims to replace one of the wrong use cases that projects (FOSS or not) weirdly decide to use Discord for, such as replacement for a “contact forum” or “support forum”.
Such a great point.
I’ve refused to use software that require things like Discord or Telegram for support.
Use a proper tool on your website.
I know, I literally quoted the line after it to put emphasis on the fact he wasn’t saying it’s a discord replacement but one where live chat and voice rooms aren’t the focus
tbh he could have just said it’s a new type of forum because it really has nothing to do with discord at all
It has unfortunately, a lot to do with Discord. I am a members of a dozen or so Discord servers, none of which are used for live chat, audio, screen sharing, etc. This software would be a 1:1 replacement for all of those servers.
You should be correct in saying that this software is not a replacement for Discord, but it is, just not in every single instance.
hmmmm seems to deploy fine but when I try to register a new account (per the setup instructions) I just get an unknown error.
The concept is promising, as I said before I’ve been wishing for an integrated forum/wiki for a while now, but it seems like it’s very early days for this project.
The AI stuff has me bristling though. Not a fan.
thank you for sharing my product here! I grew up on forums, it’s somewhat of a love letter to the mid 2000s I spent many hours of my youth with, happy to answer any questions on the project!
Could you give us a brief overview of the use of AI in the production of Storyden? Like which components are ai-assisted, and to what degree?
I think this is the main sticking point people have with the project, especially since it is apparently in use but it’s not super clear how.
sure, so I use a ton of codegen and hand-write the openapi schema, jsonschemas and database model, I use AI often to write the mapping/binding boilerplate that goes between the outside-to-inside world (database stuff to queriers/writers and http handlers to actual logic) then I write the logic itself as well as the end-to-end tests. I find language models work very well once you have a clear set of constraints/boundaries such as a clear api contract + generated types or a set of tests that define the behaviour. I use a mix of claude and codex. Claude I find works well for exploratory/experimental work (a ton of the new plugin system was R&D so claude helped set up and tear down a bunch of potential implementations and ideas) codex is a lot less interactive and doesn’t seem to play well with creative r&d style exploratory workflows, so I use that one more for well planned out features using the codegen mentioned before.
while I somewhat understand the “sticking point” it allows me to work faster and focus on the more enjoyable side of the craft i’ve honed for almost 20 years. While it’s still not a super popular project and a couple of friends sometimes help, it’s just me doing it so the AI helps a lot when I only have a couple of hours a night to work on it!
outside of pure code, I used a combination of very early generative imagery models (circa 2022 I think) for the hero art, which started life as a sketch, scanned in, with some iterations on Dall-E (back when it was an app before chatgpt absorbed it) and a few hours painting and expanding in photoshop with my wacom. for future art on blog posts and such, I’m keen to commission a human artist for future marketing assets (in case you know anyone!)
and I think finally, lots of exploratory discussion with chatgpt on api design, http semantics, cross-browser cookie behaviours, boring stuff like that… very useful!
do you think it would be worth including some blurb about how ai tools are used in the readme for this kinda crowd who are understandably skeptical of many open source projects now due to irresponsible usage of ai?
Some kind of weird WebGL error on their site I’ve never seen before.
Doesn’t load for me.
LibreWolf doesn’t seem to be offering to activate canvas.
Oh well.
Same for me in IronFox.
Me too
Application error: a client-side exception has occurred while loading www.storyden.org (see the browser console for more information).Exactly same error for me. I’m glad there are such indicators so I don’t have to waste my time on such a crappy overcomplicated design.
Works fine in Firefox on Android
Same for me, why does a forum software need webgl?
You mean why does the site for a forum software need webgl, by which the only reason I can think of is tracking visitors somehow. It’s not like the background landscape on the site is dynamic or something.
i added a dumb globe thingy and some useless effects in a mania of creative chaos, not felt a spark of creativity in ages and hate the current site, but you’re right this was stupid, i removed the useless webgl stuff and made it simpler, thanks for the feedback!
Thanks!
It’s not so much about wholly removing webgl contrasted to at least having some sort of fallback that allows the site to be experienced, but thanks again for at least tackling the change.
But, background is dynamic. You can see it has some kind of fancy moving dots. It’s totally unnecessary, but clearly WebGL was used for that.
Oh, so it is, hadn’t noticed it at first.
And, sure enough, disabling webgl in about:config causes the page to throw the error, instead of degrading gracefully. An animation of random dots is not at all necessary to expose about a product that is a web forum.
There is also a 3D spinning globe, so that too.
Looks cool. Is it already supported by NixOS?
Will have to look into this. Been saying for a while that a wiki-forum combo would make sense, since a forum slowly becomes a repository of knowledge, if not generally then at least for its members, and a less linear and more browsable way to catalog that knowledge would make sense. You can set up a separate wiki server but then you have two things to manage and moderate.
It mentions many AI features. Is this vibe-coded?
imo this line of questioning will become increasing irrelevant, coding might just be the best thing about AI, you’re going to find fewer and fewer projects hand crafted
Depends heavily on use. If it’s only for completion or for tedious tasks or for ideas, then yeah it’s fine. But if it’s a fully vibe-coded app it brings into question wether the author has the skill to maintain and keep developing the project.
That’s why it should be asked, or even better, just answered in the README.
From what I can tell the author uses AI assistance in creating API endpoints and some front end styling.
Looks like the pictures are also AI generated?
The marketing mixes metaphors, talking about gardening, growing, curating… all part of sustainable process that includes plants dying.
It also uses words like forever and permanent.
Having content live forever is at odds with metaphors of the natural world, where things naturally die.
Well permaculture is a thing in gardening ^^
I mean, it’s not “forever” as in “until the end of all things”, but as much set and forget as I would like in a knowledgebase (and in a garden).
I think the metaphors refer to different aspects of the project. The gardening refers to a more deliberate, small scale, cultivated experience tailored to your community, which is opposed to commercial factory farms that produce a monoculture on a massive scale for profit.
The permanence refers to the fact that you own and control the data, so you are in control of its lifecycle, not a third party that could kill it at their discretion.
Oh great more cool FOSS projects to bookmark
Whatever happened to vBulletin? That was peak forum software. Simple to use, no frills, and no bloated tracking shit.
All the car community forums are operated by Fora at this point, and they’re trying to push some bullshit AI assistant called “ForaFrank”. I blocked it on every car forum I’m a part of, and have encouraged others to do the same.
