Why Sblurp exists.

A lot of communities live inside Slack or Discord because nothing else was easy. Sblurp is the easy thing that is also yours.

Chat for communities, not for a platform

Slack is built for companies and prices itself that way. Discord is built for growth, which means ads, upsells and features that serve the platform first. Both keep every community's history on their servers, under their rules, for as long as they like.

Sblurp works the other way around. Each community runs its own server and keeps its own messages. The people who run it decide the rules, the retention and who gets in. If they want to leave, they copy one file.

What sblurp.chat does

This site holds your account: your email, your password, your username and an optional profile. It hands out sign-in tokens that community servers check. That is all. It never sees a message, a channel or a member list.

When you join a community, the app asks before it shares your profile with it. Each server gets a token made only for that server, so a token from one community is useless at another.

What we will not do

• Show ads.
• Sell your information, or share it with third parties. Your profile goes only to the communities you choose.
• Add AI features you did not ask for. Bots exist, but they are members that admins add on purpose, and they are labeled as bots.

Encryption, honestly

Encrypted in transit. Not end-to-end encrypted: the admins of a community can read its messages, including DMs. Use Signal when you need that.

End-to-end encryption makes search, moderation and history on new devices much harder. For a community chat we chose to make those work, and to say plainly what that costs.

Who makes it

Sblurp is made by Ian. He has used nearly every chat there is: Hotline on the classic Mac, IRC, ICQ, AIM, Jabber, HipChat and the rest.

In 2010 he built group chat in the browser, with channels, images and messages that arrived in real time. He shelved it to make a game. Around the same time, another small team was making a game too. Their game closed, and the chat tool they built for themselves became Slack.

Sblurp is the chat he set aside, finished this time, and owned by the communities that use it. The community server is open source under the AGPL.

Write to [email protected], or join the Sblurp community server and say hello.