Anonymous group chat · Discord-shaped
Yapbox is a group chat that looks and works like Discord — servers, channels, roles, the lot — where your handle in each community is derived from one identity, and nothing connects them. Not other members. Not the server. Not us.
Same seed and same community gives the same handle, every time — so inside a community you are persistently you. A different community gives a handle with nothing in common. The server stores the right-hand column and nothing that could recompute it.
On Discord one account is one global identity: every server sees the same user ID, so anyone who knows you in one place can find you in another. Yapbox is built around the opposite.
Same handle every time you return. Roles, history, reputation and moderation all work the way you expect, because to that community you are one consistent person.
Your handles are cryptographically unlinkable — to other members and to the server. A marine-life nerd, a night-shift nurse and a letterpress printer can be one human, and nobody can tell.
One identity, one recovery phrase, one login. The separation is in the maths, not in juggling burner accounts.
Group end-to-end encryption with key rotation, multi-device and verification takes years to get right. A Discord-shaped interface takes months. So Yapbox builds the tractable thing on top of the hard thing: Matrix for the cryptography, a Discord-shaped Matrix client for the interface, and an identity layer of our own.
None of this needs new cryptography. Privacy Pass, VOPRFs and HKDF are standard primitives; Signal already uses anonymous credentials so its group server can verify you're a member without learning which one. Recovery and multi-device are inherited from Matrix: cross-signing for new devices, secure backup for a lost one, and social recovery — split your key across people you trust, who are already in your communities.
Nearly every Discord affordance exists because plaintext lives on the server. Take that away and some things behave differently on day one. We would rather say so than half-support them.
| On Discord | What breaks without a readable server | What Yapbox does instead |
|---|---|---|
| Scrollback on join | You weren't a member, so you were never given the keys. New joiners see an empty room. | Say so, honestly. Members can choose to share history on invite — a decision with a cost, not a default. |
| Server-wide search | There is no server-side index over plaintext. | Search runs on your device, over your own history. Fast, but only yours. |
| Bots | A bot can't read what it can't decrypt. | A bot with keys is a member with full access. The UI says exactly that. |
| Moderation | Mods can't see everything. | Reporting reveals the reported message and nothing else. |
| Log in from anywhere | Throwaway sessions fight key material. | Each new device is verified by one you already hold. We accept the friction. |
Not a bug
That is what a new member sees in a Yapbox channel, with the reason attached. Messages sent before you joined were encrypted to the people who were there. The server holds ciphertext it cannot read, and no key was ever issued to you. Whether that sentence lands is the product's honesty test.
Named in September 2026. The prototype is not a mock: the seed, the per-community derivation and the message encryption are real WebCrypto, running in your browser. What it doesn't have is a network, a server, or the credential issuance and admission machinery — which is where the real work lives. Three questions come first, in dependency order.
@user:server, bound to a server and woven through federation. How far we can go on anonymous identity depends on this, so it gates everything else.Three communities, three handles, one seed. Flip to the server's-eye view to see what would actually be stored, then join a fourth community and watch a fresh handle appear.