Banned from Discord for a frog emoji (thanks "child safety"), so I bankrupted myself building FrogTalk – a self-hostable Discord/Telegram killer 🐸
from FrogTalkXYZ@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 15 May 03:23
https://lemmy.world/post/46883856

Hey selfhosters, A few weeks ago Discord permanently banned me. The reason? I was spamming the frog emoji 🐸. Apparently that’s now a “child safety” issue. No joke, no appeal, just instant ban. I was pissed, so instead of touching grass I decided to nuke my savings and build something better. Meet FrogTalk — my janky but actually decent self-hosted chat platform. It’s got end-to-end encryption, DMs, group chats, a built-in 4chan-style imageboard (Frog Channel), YouTube/Spotify watch parties, voice/video, the works. You can even bridge it with Discord and Telegram so your servers sync in real time. Everything runs on your own server. No phone number, no email, no selling your data. Federation and Tor friendly too. I’m currently broke as hell from building this, but it was worth it. Tired of big tech platforms banning you for memes? Come run your own instance. Check it out: frogtalk.xyz (Yes it’s open source. Yes I need ramen. Star it or spin up a node if you like it.)

frogtalk

#selfhosted

threaded - newest

unitedwithme@lemmy.today on 15 May 03:34 next collapse

Hell yeah, dude!!

I’m not a Dev, but how did this break the bank? How can we support your efforts?

B0rax@feddit.org on 15 May 04:12 collapse

If I were to guess: it was the AI subscription that cost that money…

mpramann@discuss.tchncs.de on 15 May 04:34 collapse

Looking only at the web page it is obvious he let AI completely take over the wheel. Even if the whole “banned for frog emoji” origin story would not smell like utter BS I wouldn’t trust any of my data or resources to this creation.

Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world on 15 May 05:03 collapse

I’m not defending this guy. I know nothing of him, nor his story. I haven’t even clicked the link, or seen the screenshot.

All that being said, I can absolutely believe some service (in this case discord) would ban him without just cause or recoarse.

Back in 2018 I got banned by twitter BEFORE musk bought it. A pro-wrestler posted a funny video of herself. I replied “Oh man, that killed me!”

As in…that was very funny.

Twitter bots mistook that for a threat of violence. Banned.

In 2023 I was awarded on reddit as being in the top 1% of karma earners for 2022.

Then, later in 2023, they offered me the chance to buy reddit stock before it went public. Well, I was dealing with cancer at the time, and had $0 income. So I couldn’t.

Then after I declined they gave my account a strike for a comment I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Like nothing about the comment even made sense what they were flagging.

Then it did it again the next week, just as the reddit IPO went public.

Then again a day later. Which banned my 10+ year old account. Someone on lemmy speculated that it was because I didn’t buy the IPO. Someone else speculated it’s because I used a VPN.

Either way, reddit’s official stance is that I was harassing users. When I asked what part of any of my 3 messages was threatening, the reply I got didn’t even address my question. Instead it just said my comments were reviewed by a team of humans who deemed my comments to be harassment.

To this day, I still don’t believe any human actually looked at my comments.

LaserTurboShark69@sh.itjust.works on 15 May 03:33 next collapse

The immediate f slur in the screenshot might not be the best promotional technique

makeshiftreaper@lemmy.world on 15 May 03:35 next collapse

Yeah, it screams unreliable narrator. “I was banned over a frog!” and definitely not for throwing slurs around

TheTechnician27@lemmy.world on 15 May 04:25 collapse

Also tells me this is 100% a barely functioning piece of trash they whipped up with an LLM like a whiny, shit-smearing toddler.

Sanctus@anarchist.nexus on 15 May 03:35 next collapse

I guess they really meant it when they said 4Chan style

Blooper@lemmy.world on 15 May 03:36 next collapse

It is if you’re targeting edgelord maga folks

cybervseas@lemmy.world on 15 May 03:50 next collapse

Good catch thanks, was thinking about setting this up for a family-friendly hobby, but not sure if I’d need to manage having an age limit…

A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip on 15 May 04:40 collapse

TBF it’s only in this screenshot, not on the website but yeah… it doesn’t make OP look good and immediately puts in question the “I got banned over emojis” narrative… and then what else.

themachine@lemmy.world on 15 May 04:07 next collapse

Does it do screen sharing distributed via the server?

django@discuss.tchncs.de on 15 May 04:09 next collapse

Why is it part python, part PHP?

A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip on 15 May 04:42 next collapse

Oh ouch. That’s not illegal of course but not a great choice.

(Since my last move I’m trying to run my server PHP-free and thanks to many Python applications it’s totally possible)

UntimedDiffusion@piefed.zip on 15 May 05:36 collapse

a few weeks ago

This whole thing was made by an llm

tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden on 15 May 04:36 next collapse

Even if you ignore the slur, the frogs and the rune in the background: Building a chat network with proper e2ee in a few weeks doesn’t sound good. It’s clear this is made with LLMs and I wouldn’t trust it’s everyone nat all.

Flipper@feddit.org on 15 May 04:46 collapse

For a discord or Telegramm alternative it doesnt need to be e2e.

tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden on 15 May 06:04 collapse

But it claims to be.

Redjard@reddthat.com on 15 May 07:45 next collapse

Also claims to have federation with self-hostable nodes.
Def would like to see someone do some testing on it.

Flipper@feddit.org on 15 May 09:03 collapse

Oh I missed that. Oh no. Rolling your own crypto, surely nothing can go wrong.

Archer@lemmy.world on 15 May 09:19 collapse

Don’t worry guys, the AI checked all the crypto

Quokka@quokk.au on 15 May 05:35 next collapse

Get this Nazi shit off of here

In the background is https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/othala-rune

Use of F slur

This is some alt-right shitware

Redjard@reddthat.com on 15 May 08:26 next collapse

I checked the actual code and there is no e2ee, at all.
It has some of the basic setup stuff, like giving you a recovery file, and messages are seemingly encrypted, but everyone can decrypt everything and the platform has none of the structure to deal with all the issues proper e2e brings.

As a very simple test: If you write a message in a server, close the tab. Make a new account and open that chat. You can read the message. Meaning anyone can.
The way actual e2ee does this is it signs messages for anyone in the chat at that moment. Anyone new can’t read old messages unless an old member sends them the contents.

Also this stuff is buggy in the actual functioning.

Also it’s full of trackers and weirdly loads youtube for no reason.

Also it’s full of nazis, the actual state is so much worse than the screenshots shown in the post. The top channels are “4chan” and “wagnersdom”.

slacktoid@lemmy.ml on 15 May 08:35 collapse

So vibecoded by a Nazi?

Redjard@reddthat.com on 15 May 08:38 collapse

by a Nazi for Nazis.