Dens is chat for your friends or small community: text channels, DMs, voice and screen share. It runs on your own computer, or a friend’s, instead of a company’s servers.

01Not on their terms 02Not under their watch 03Not their product

People need room to talk among themselves: to argue, joke badly, make art, and be wrong, without a company keeping the record. Dens is that room. The people in it, not a platform, set its rules.

Install

Host it yourself

A platform’s rules are written for its advertisers, payment processors and app stores, and they change when those do. Each change takes a slice of what’s allowed, and the people who posted it, with it. A community built there owns nothing and has no say in what happens to it.

A den has one rulebook, written by the people who run it, like a friend hosting a game server. Dens gives them what they need to keep it: moderators, bans, deleting messages, and auto-delete so old conversations fade instead of piling up. It isn’t a place to threaten people or to trade in material whose making hurt someone; that’s illegal everywhere Dens is, and nothing here changes that. It is a place where adults decide for themselves what they’ll say, read and make, and answer to each other for it rather than to a policy written for someone else.

Hosting means forwarding a few ports on your router and pointing a domain at your IP. That’s the fiddly part, so there’s a step by step guide written for people who’ve never done either.

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Your PC
EULA: unroll the terms for your own PC

End user license agreement

  1. It’s your computer.
  2. It’s your den. Be cool to each other.
  3. The code is MIT licensed: do what you want with it. It comes with no warranty.
THE CLOUD(SOMEONE ELSE’S COMPUTER)RACK 4471 · YOUR STUFFADVERTISERSPAYMENT PROCESSORSAPP STORESDATA BROKERSTRUST & SAFETYSHAREHOLDERS
Their cloud
EULA: unroll the cloud’s terms of service

Terms of service

Revision 47. Effective whenever we say. Supersedes everything you agreed to before.

  1. Acceptance. By opening, scrolling, hovering over or thinking about this service, you agree to these terms. We may change them at any time, for any reason, and will let you know by changing them.
  2. Your content. You keep ownership of your content. You grant us a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, sublicensable and transferable license to host, store, copy, analyze, modify, translate, publish, display, distribute and train on it, and to let our partners do the same.
  3. Acceptable use. You will not post anything that our advertisers, payment processors, app stores, insurers, investors, the loudest accounts in our replies, or any government we are currently trying to please would find upsetting. This list may change before you finish reading it.
  4. Moderation. We may remove content, mute, suspend or delete accounts, and close whole communities at our sole discretion. Appeals are reviewed by an automated system trained on the content it removed.
  5. Your data. We collect what you say, who you say it to, when, from where, on what device, and how long you hesitated before sending it. We share it with our affiliates, our partners, their partners, and anyone holding a court order or a sufficiently large purchase order.
  6. Personalization. To improve your experience, we will show you things you did not ask for, in the space where your friends used to be.
  7. Features. Features you rely on may be moved into a paid tier, renamed, or retired. Your community may be measured as engagement and optimized accordingly.
  8. Disputes. You waive your right to a class action, a jury trial, and a sense of humor. Disputes are settled by an arbitrator we pick, in a city you have never been to.
  9. Termination. We may end the service, or your access to it, at any time. Your messages, art, inside jokes and years of your friends’ lives will be handled in accordance with section 5.
  10. Liability. Nothing is our fault. To the extent anything is our fault, see section 9.
  11. Changes. See section 1.
  1. 12.1 Deleting a message hides it from you.
  2. 12.2 “Free” is just a cosmetic label; you’re paying in ways you can’t comprehend.
  3. 12.3 If you don’t pay attention during ads, we suspend your service. Attention may be verified by asking you to say the advertiser’s name out loud to end the ad; see US 8,246,454 B2. We are not Sony or associated with them.
  4. 12.4 Encryption is available where available.
  5. 12.5 Deleting your account hides it from you. You can’t have it back or be forgotten, for your safety.
  6. 12.6 Your username is yours until someone more valuable wants it.
  7. 12.7 Your community’s rules are our rules, which are our advertisers’ rules.
  8. 12.8 Headings are for convenience only and do not mean what they say.
  9. 12.9 If any provision is found unenforceable, the others will be enforced harder.
  10. 12.10 You may not scrape, export, reverse engineer, or meaningfully leave.
  11. 12.11 Rights holders, partners, sponsors and their vendors may also review your content.
  12. 12.12 We are committed to your privacy, which is why we wrote this document.
  13. 12.13 Third-party cookies are delicious, and you have consented to them.
  14. 12.14 Your continued breathing constitutes acceptance.
  15. 12.15 Anything you post may be used to train something that replaces you.
  16. 12.16 Account recovery requires a government ID, a selfie, your SSN, pictures of your children, address, and bank info. This info will be shared with local and federal law enforcement. Typical recovery requests get a response within 6 months.
  17. 12.17 Archived content may be unarchived, sold, or shown at a shareholder meeting.
  18. 12.18 All private messages will be scanned and sent to law enforcement if needed. Do not worry if they contain jokes; we can tell the difference. We are not Snapchat or associated with them.
  19. 12.19 Our policies default to the most authoritarian jurisdiction we operate in.
  20. 12.20 We may tell you about changes by email, banner, push notification, or not at all.
  21. 12.21 You agree to cease possessing sexual traits, expressions and thoughts. You will also have as many children as possible and ensure they use our products.
  22. 12.22 Premium features include features.
  23. 12.23 We may sunset any product, including the one you just moved your whole community to.
  24. 12.24 By reading this far you have agreed to the next clause.
  25. 12.25 You agree to stop reading.

Sign here ______________________ (you already did)

Encrypted and pseudonymous by default

Dens seals your DMs, group DMs and calls end to end, so only the people in them can read or hear them. It knows you only as a username and a key that never leaves your computer: no email, no phone number, no account that follows you from den to den. And it strips the location and camera details out of your photos before they’re sent, and never writes your IP address to disk.

Here’s how that compares with similar apps, including where they do better.

Who sits between you and the people you talk to. A filled mark is the private answer, half is partly, hollow is no.
DensDiscordSignalMatrix
Who runs the serverYou, or a friendDiscordSignalYou, or a host you pick
Who can read your group chatsThe den reads channels; a group DM, only its membersDiscordOnly the groupThe room, if encrypted; if not, every server in it
DMs end-to-end encryptedYesNoYesYes
Calls end-to-end encryptedYesYes¹YesYes, Element Call
Signing up asks forAn inviteEmail or a phone, and your birthdayA phone number²Up to the server
Who sees your IP addressThe den, while you’re connectedDiscordSignal, and contacts you callYour server; in calls, other members’ servers too
Open sourceYes, MITNoYesYes
Paid for byNobody: a member’s PC and a domainNitro, and adsDonationsMemberships and donations; some hosts charge

1. Since March 2026, except Stage channels; text isn’t end-to-end encrypted. 2. Signal is testing a paid sign-up without a phone number, on Android. Matrix here means Element, its main app. Facts as of November 2026, from each project’s own pages.

under the hood

Open source

Every line is on GitHub under the MIT license. Read it, fork it, run it, rip it apart. If anything on this page is a lie, you can check.

Built for home internet

Dens is meant to run on a normal PC on a residential connection, where upload speed is precious. A den is sized for about a thousand members.

Why it asks for admin

Installing and updating ask for admin, but Dens itself never runs as admin. That’s how Dens gets its own locked-down system account: it runs while you’re logged out, and your keys sit in a separate process that your browser, your games and whatever that mod installer did can’t read without admin rights.

What seals your DMs

Standard parts, not homemade ones: X25519 and post-quantum ML-KEM-768 set up each DM’s key, and XChaCha20-Poly1305 seals what you send, all from Go’s own crypto libraries. How they fit together is Dens’s own design, public but not yet independently audited. Your key is made on your computer and the den never sees it, so it carries your DMs without being able to read them. See Privacy for what Dens protects you from and what it doesn’t.

Not their product

Somebody paid for that free chat app, and they want their money back. With interest. So it fills up with ads and upsells, and the stuff you liked moves behind a subscription. An app that doesn’t squeeze its users gets passed over by investors for one that does, and eventually runs out of money and shuts down.

Dens has nobody to pay back. There’s no company and no central server: each den runs on a computer belonging to one of its members, so the only running cost is a domain name. The downloads are built by GitHub Actions and served from Cloudflare R2, both free at this size. It didn’t need investors either. One person built it, working with AI, and every line is public, so the work is there to check. Dens is free software under the MIT license. Nobody makes money off your den, including me.