Keep P2P as the default for small rooms — that’s most servers most of the time and the no-extra-infra story is genuinely valuable for self-hosters.
[I] went mediasoup, built into Haven, after all. The two things that pushed my plan above toward LiveKit are gone now. It runs on one port instead of a whole range, and it downloads a ready-made build instead of compiling anything.
While the code is a slop hodgepodge, Haven is currently the only Discord clone I have found that makes it easy to selfhost; no extra open port except 443 80, single docker container, no extra database.
Website: https://haven-app.com/

I could rant about the slop but it’s pointless because the developers of this didn’t even understand why Discord alternatives never work out.
- Bridging Discord without bots on Discord’s side is against Discord ToS, so don’t rely on that.
- P2P is a great idea except it scares the hoes so you’ve cut 80% of your market off right there.
- No federation so realistically everyone is gonna have to create and manage like 10 separate accounts for each of their friend groups, which even the most hardcore anti-Discord folks aren’t going to bother with.
Also this is a promo post, however sneaky you try to make it. Tag appropriately.
I did tag it?
Edit: I’ve now added it to the title too, I guess some clients don’t support piefed’s tags
Turns out the piefed tags don’t federate with lemmy, if you want proof I wasn’t acting in bad faith look at the post from my server.
https://piefed.nl/c/selfhosted@lemmy.world/p/226603/haven-discord-alternative-discussion-on-p2p-mediasoup-livekit
Once i find a different discord clone thats this easy to selfhost I’ll switch to it immediately. Before commenting I’d urge you to try selfhosting the other clones its a mindfield of ports which scares me off tbh
Wtf is a mindfield
For lifekit to work it needs direct https access, if you’re running caddy server that means connecting the tls certs to livekit somehow then opening up a hole range of ports.
You make a point on federation but Haven does allow you to login using sso from your own server.
I guess it’s also about what you need, for a small server for a 3-12 friends it works fine where alternatives are total overkill to selfhost.
Here is the docker-compose file I’m using (I reverse proxy http://localhost:3000/ on the host):
services: haven: container_name: haven image: ghcr.io/ancsemi/haven:latest ports: - 127.0.0.1:3000:3000 volumes: - ./data:/data environment: - PORT=3000 - FORCE_HTTP=true restart: unless-stopped




