---
title: Introducing, Realm
date: 2024-11-03
lastmod: 2024-11-03T01:00:00-04:00
draft: false
description: Collaborate, Communicate, Connect
image: featured-image.webp
tags:
  - messaging
  - secure
  - decentralized
  - federated
  - community
categories:
  - realm
toc: true
---
Welcome to Realm, a decentralized, federated forum and messaging platform designed to help empower communities. The app aims to compete with Discord and Reddit in providing easy-to-use, open-source programs anyone can run to host their own communities, as well as to guide the direction of the platform's development.

## Why?

Almost 10 months ago, [Reddit made a deal with Google](https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/22/24080165/google-reddit-ai-training-data) to allow exclusive access to content posted to be used in LLM training, in a shock to the hundreds of thousands of users who contributed their free time and resources to building libraries worth of information. In the two months after this [Reddit went on to announce its IPO on the stock market](https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/reddit-set-hotly-anticipated-debut-after-pricing-ipo-top-range-2024-03-21/) and in May [announced a similar deal to Google's with OpenAI](https://openai.com/index/openai-and-reddit-partnership/). Then in June, Reddit made waves in the news again for [blocking anyone from crawling the site under there robots.txt file](https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/25/24185984/reddit-robots-txt-fight-ai-bots-scraping-crawlers), meaning that search engines like Bing or DuckDuckGo could no longer crawl Reddit for use in search results, only Google and OpenAI could with their deals with the company.

All of these actions over the course of the last year has shown a clear trend that Reddit's focus is squarely on profit at the expense of its users and is willing to exploit their content by any means necessary, through selling it to other companies without its users seeing a dime. While not inherently being a bad thing alone, Reddit's quest for profit has come at the cost of the usability of the platform and creates a lock in effect, where users feel compelled to stay because the generational wealth of information even as the company grows more user hostile. Content on Reddit on average has also decreased as moderation tools became blocked with [the API changes that occurred last year](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Reddit_API_controversy), once again putting monetization and profit over the health of the platform.

Though, Reddit isn't the only place for communities with many younger people gravitating towards using Discord for this instead. Discord functions similarly to the internet chatrooms of an older era while also offering voice channels like Mumble, all while providing hosting for free. The main issue that occurs from this is the preservation of information. Chat rooms are more ephemeral then forum posts and make it harder to follow a conversation or to jump in on one as the line between start and end are fuzzier. This leads to the same questions being asked over a and over again. The ability to search within a channel is also poorly designed and makes it hard to link back to previous conversations in order to alleviate the above issue. Information is also harder to find from the greater internet, as these chatrooms are unable to be indexed by search engines, leading to users having to join the server for a quick answer and making their quest for information feel clunky overall.

## Goals

Realm plans to solve these issues by proving an open-source, self-hostable platform (so that there is no need for upkeep and finance from a central source) that can provide the pros of forum posts with the ease-of-use of chats as well as being accessible from a website as well as desktop (providing access to indexers). 

## Early Demo

Windows builds of the client are available here at [realm.abunchofknowitalls.com](https://realm.abunchofknowitalls.com). All the source code of the project is available [on GitHub](https://github.com/joshuafhiggins/realm-chat), in order to compile for Linux or macOS.

## Plans for the Future

The current demo is a very rough prototype and I plan to redesign the protocol as well as the client in the future. Watch out for future posts that will detail how each application was designed and my plans on how to remake them.