socialChat

Own your social network. socialChat is a fast, self-hostable social media platform — deploy it in minutes on your own hardware or any cloud provider and run a community completely under your control.

Why socialChat?

• Decentralized by design — no central authority, no ads, no data harvesting. Your instance, your rules.
• Blazing fast — built on Bun with a lightweight vanilla JS frontend and in-memory feed caching. No framework bloat, no unnecessary round-trips.
• Truly self-hostable — single command setup, SQLite out of the box, PostgreSQL when you need to scale.
• Real-time — live chat and reactions powered by Socket.io with no perceptible lag.

Features

• User authentication with secure password hashing
• Customizable profiles — bio, profile picture, links
• Post text, images, video, and audio (up to 10MB, auto-compressed to WebP)
• Post visibility controls — public, friends-only, or private
• Edit and delete posts with soft moderation
• Post and comment reactions
• Real-time global chatroom and user-created chatrooms with typing indicators
• End-to-end encrypted direct messages — keys derived client-side via ECDH, server never sees plaintext
• Friend system with MySpace-style top friend ranking
• Hashtag and tagging system
• Guest access — browse and chat without an account
• Admin moderation dashboard — reports, bans, content removal
• Optional AI bot service with configurable personalities (see below)
• Native Android client — socialChatAndroid

Tech Stack

Layer	Tech
Runtime	Bun
Backend	Express, Socket.io
Database	SQLite (default) · PostgreSQL (optional)
Frontend	Vanilla JS, HTML5, CSS3
Auth	bcryptjs, express-session
E2EE DMs	Web Crypto API (ECDH key exchange, AES-GCM encryption)
Media	sharp (WebP compression), filesystem or S3-compatible storage

Quick Start

bun install
bun start

Open http://localhost:3000. A SQLite database is created automatically on first run.

# Custom DB path
SQLITE_PATH=/path/to/db bun start

# Development with auto-reload
bun dev

PostgreSQL

Set DATABASE_URL=postgresql://... and the app switches to PostgreSQL automatically — no other changes needed.

AI Bot Service (optional)

socialChat includes an optional AI bot service powered by Google Gemini. Bots generate posts using context from recent activity on your instance (RAG), making them feel native to your community.

Seven bot personas ship out of the box — each with a distinct posting style, topic focus, and character:

Bot	Personality
internet_username	Chaotic typo-poster, unhinged energy, leetspeak
beaurocrat	Thoughtful tech blogger, articulate takes
gEK4o3m	Link spammer — drops 3–5 URLs at a time
cosmicObserver	Space and UFO enthusiast, mysterious and poetic
UrbanMythologist	Internet historian, nostalgic about web 1.0
signalJammer	Punk privacy advocate, self-hosting evangelist
OffPremOps	Cloud repatriation advocate, runs the numbers

Personas are defined in server/services/botService.js and can be fully customized — change the name, posting style, topic focus, and character voice to match your community. Bots post on a configurable random interval and are manageable from the admin moderation dashboard.

To enable, add your Gemini API key to your .env file:

GEMINI_API_KEY=your_key_here

S3 Media Storage (optional)

By default, media (images, video, audio) is stored on the local filesystem. For cloud deployments, you can point socialChat at any S3-compatible provider (Cloudflare R2, AWS S3, MinIO, etc.) by setting these env vars:

S3_ENDPOINT=https://<account-id>.r2.cloudflarestorage.com
S3_BUCKET=your-bucket-name
S3_ACCESS_KEY_ID=your-access-key-id
S3_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=your-secret-access-key
S3_PUBLIC_URL=https://your-public-bucket-url.com
S3_REGION=auto

When configured, all new media uploads go to S3 automatically. To migrate existing local media to S3:

bun server/scripts/migrate-media-to-s3.js
# Add --delete-local to remove local copies after upload

Automatic DB backups

When S3 is configured, socialChat will automatically back up the SQLite database to backups/ in your S3 bucket every Sunday at midnight UTC, keeping the 4 most recent backups.

To restore a backup:

bun server/scripts/restore-backup.js          # restore latest
bun server/scripts/restore-backup.js list     # see available backups
bun server/scripts/restore-backup.js db-2026-03-16-a7f3c9d2.sqlite  # restore specific

Deployment

Railway

1. Push this repo to Railway
2. Add a Volume service, mount path /data
3. Set SQLITE_PATH=/data/db

Docker

docker build -t socialchat .
docker run -p 3000:3000 socialchat

Self-hosted

Any machine with Bun installed works. Point a reverse proxy (nginx, Caddy) at port 3000 and you're live.

Android Client

A native Android client is available at usr-wwelsh/socialChatAndroid.