What is echo?

Echo is an open source platform for running your own private community space, similar in spirit to Discord but designed so you control every part of it. It provides real time text chat, voice and video calls, servers and channels, direct messages, and role based permissions, without treating your community's activity as advertising data. You can run Echo yourself on your own server, which is called self hosting, and you can fork or modify the code freely because it is licensed under the AGPL. That license does come with one obligation: if you change the code and offer it as an online service to other people, you must also make your modified source code available to them under the same license. Under the hood, Echo is built as a full stack web application. The frontend is a Vue 3 single page app, and the backend is a Node.js API built with Fastify, using Socket.IO to handle realtime messages and PostgreSQL to store data permanently. For voice and video calls it relies on LiveKit, and it can optionally use NATS to help the realtime system scale across multiple servers. There are also native desktop and Android apps built with Tauri, plus a separate marketing website built with Astro, and optional tools for bridging with or importing data from Discord. To try it locally, you install dependencies from the project root with npm, start a local database, and run the development server. Production deployment needs a real PostgreSQL database and Node.js version 22.13 or newer. The project also ships as a progressive web app, meaning it can be installed like a native app directly from a browser such as Chrome. This project fits people who want to run a private, ad free community platform they fully own and control, and developers comfortable setting up and maintaining their own servers, databases, and realtime infrastructure.