I Built a Private Voice Chat App Because I Was Done Giving Discord My Conversations

description: Squawk is a self-hosted, open source voice and text chat app for gaming groups. Here's why I built it and what I learned along the way. --- I play games with a small group of friends. We've been using Discord for years. It works fine — but at some point I started thinking about what "works fine" actually means. Every conversation we have passes through Discord's servers. Every voice session, every message, every "we're planning this at this time" — all of it sitting in a database I have no visibility into. For most people that's a totally acceptable trade-off. For me it started to feel like an unnecessary one. So I built something. What is Squawk? Squawk is a self-hosted voice and text chat app built for small private groups. You run it on your own machine. Your friends connect through Tailscale — a zero-config private VPN. Nobody else can reach the server. No accounts needed, no data leaving your network. The core features: 🎤 Peer-to-peer voice chat via WebRTC (audio neve