Skycord is now fully open source

Starting today, every line of code that powers Skycord is public. The server, the web client, the mobile apps, the self-hosting tooling, and the infrastructure scripts — all of it is on GitHub under the AGPL-3.0 license.

This is something we've been planning since day one, but delayed until we felt the codebase was worth reading. That moment arrived.

What's in the repo

• skycord/server — The Rust-based WebSocket and HTTP API server. This is the core. 41,000 lines of well-commented Rust.
• skycord/web — The Next.js web client you're using right now.
• skycord/mobile — The React Native iOS and Android apps.
• skycord/e2e — End-to-end tests and integration test harness.
• skycord/infra — Terraform modules and Helm charts for cloud deployments.
• skycord/docs — The full documentation source.

Why open source?

The privacy claims we make — that we can't read your messages, that encryption is real — are not auditable unless you can read the code. "Trust us" is not an answer when communities are having sensitive conversations.

Open source lets you verify the Signal Protocol implementation yourself. It lets security researchers find bugs before attackers do. It means our encryption claims are falsifiable, not just marketing.

There's a second reason. We believe the infrastructure for private communities shouldn't be owned by any one company — including us. If Skycord ever becomes something you don't trust, you should be able to fork it, self-host it, and leave. That's the whole point.

Self-hosting is now first-class

Along with the open-source release, we're launching an improved self-hosting experience. The Docker Compose setup is down to a single command. The Helm chart is stable and production-tested. We're shipping a migration tool that exports your Skycord cloud data to a self-hosted instance.

Self-hosted instances can federate with each other and with Skycord cloud. Your self-hosted server is a real Skycord server, not a second-class citizen.

Contribute

We've tagged 47 issues as "good first issue" across the repos. The most impactful contributions right now are translations, platform-specific mobile polish, and documentation improvements.

If you find a security issue, please use our responsible disclosure process at security@skycord.space rather than filing a public issue. We pay bounties.

We're grateful to the communities that trusted us before we were open source. Today is for them.