Ditchcord

Ditchcord is a self-hosted, privacy-oriented chat application built with Svelte 5 and SpacetimeDB. Designed as a modern, lightweight alternative to commercial platforms, it prioritizes performance, low-latency communication, and high feature density without the bloat.

🚀 Features

Ditchcord offers a rich, Discord-inspired user experience backed by a highly scalable, WebAssembly-powered database architecture.

Multi-Server & Channel Support: Organize your communities with dedicated Text, Voice, and Threaded channels.
Blazing Fast Pagination: Uses a sophisticated hybrid "Recent Activity Cache" to load channels instantly, with on-demand expansion for deep history scrollback.
Real-Time Voice & Video: Integrated WebRTC signaling via SpacetimeDB for low-latency audio channels and screen sharing.
Rich Media & Profiles: Support for custom emojis, image uploads (up to 10MB), and customizable user profiles (avatars, banners, biographies).
Modern Svelte 5 UI: Built with Svelte Runes for granular reactivity, featuring custom portaled dropdowns, context menus, and a responsive design that adapts to your screen.
Tauri Ready: The Vite configuration is tailored for easy packaging as a native desktop application via Tauri.

🗺️ Roadmap

We are actively developing Ditchcord. Here is what's coming next:

Direct Messaging: Private, 1-on-1 conversations outside of server contexts.
Mentions & Notifications: Robust @user and @role tagging with RLS-protected notification delivery.
Read Status: Unread badges and indicators for channels and servers.
Message Interactions: Replying directly to messages (in addition to threading), grouping consecutive messages, and GIF integration.
Server Management: Private servers, invite links, role-based permission systems, and custom server avatars.
Customization: Full theming support (Dark/Light mode toggles) and hotkey shortcuts.

🛠️ Technology Stack

Frontend: Svelte 5 (TypeScript, Vite, Vanilla CSS)
Backend: SpacetimeDB (TypeScript/WASM module)
Real-time Comms: WebRTC (Peer-to-peer audio/video)
Desktop: Tauri (Planned/Configured)

Architecture Highlights

Ditchcord leverages SpacetimeDB's client-side cache model to eliminate traditional REST API bottlenecks.

Zero-Latency Switching: The client subscribes to a lightweight recent_message table for all joined servers on startup. This populates the UI instantly when switching channels.
Surgical Subscriptions: The heavy message history table is only subscribed to on-demand when a user explicitly requests older messages, saving bandwidth and memory.
WASM Reducers: All database mutations (sending messages, updating profiles) are handled by deterministic TypeScript reducers compiled to WebAssembly and executed transactionally on the server.

📦 Getting Started

Prerequisites

Node.js (v18+)
pnpm
SpacetimeDB CLI (spacetime)

Backend Setup (SpacetimeDB)

Navigate to the backend module directory:
```
cd spacetimedb
```
Install dependencies:
```
npm install
```
Publish the module to your SpacetimeDB instance (e.g., maincloud or a local instance). Note: The first publish creates the database.
```
spacetime publish --server maincloud ditchcord
```
Generate the TypeScript bindings for the frontend:
```
npm run spacetime:generate
```

Frontend Setup (Svelte 5)

Navigate to the project root:
```
cd ..
```
Install dependencies:
```
pnpm install
```
Configure your environment variables (create a .env.local file if necessary) to point to your published SpacetimeDB instance:
```
VITE_SPACETIMEDB_HOST=wss://maincloud.spacetimedb.com
VITE_SPACETIMEDB_DB_NAME=ditchcord
```
Run the development server:
```
pnpm run dev
```

📄 License

This project is open-source. Please see the LICENSE file for details.

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