Hey selfhosters, A few weeks ago Discord permanently banned me. The reason? I was spamming the frog emoji 🐸. Apparently that’s now a “child safety” issue. No joke, no appeal, just instant ban. I was pissed, so instead of touching grass I decided to nuke my savings and build something better. Meet FrogTalk — my janky but actually decent self-hosted chat platform. It’s got end-to-end encryption, DMs, group chats, a built-in 4chan-style imageboard (Frog Channel), YouTube/Spotify watch parties, voice/video, the works. You can even bridge it with Discord and Telegram so your servers sync in real time. Everything runs on your own server. No phone number, no email, no selling your data. Federation and Tor friendly too. I’m currently broke as hell from building this, but it was worth it. Tired of big tech platforms banning you for memes? Come run your own instance. Check it out: https://frogtalk.xyz/ (Yes it’s open source. Yes I need ramen. Star it or spin up a node if you like it.)
Hell yeah, dude!!
I’m not a Dev, but how did this break the bank? How can we support your efforts?
If I were to guess: it was the AI subscription that cost that money…
Looking only at the web page it is obvious he let AI completely take over the wheel. Even if the whole “banned for frog emoji” origin story would not smell like utter BS I wouldn’t trust any of my data or resources to this creation.
I’m not defending this guy. I know nothing of him, nor his story. I haven’t even clicked the link, or seen the screenshot.
All that being said, I can absolutely believe some service (in this case discord) would ban him without just cause or recoarse.
Back in 2018 I got banned by twitter BEFORE musk bought it. A pro-wrestler posted a funny video of herself. I replied “Oh man, that killed me!”
As in…that was very funny.
Twitter bots mistook that for a threat of violence. Banned.
In 2023 I was awarded on reddit as being in the top 1% of karma earners for 2022.
Then, later in 2023, they offered me the chance to buy reddit stock before it went public. Well, I was dealing with cancer at the time, and had $0 income. So I couldn’t.
Then after I declined they gave my account a strike for a comment I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Like nothing about the comment even made sense what they were flagging.
Then it did it again the next week, just as the reddit IPO went public.
Then again a day later. Which banned my 10+ year old account. Someone on lemmy speculated that it was because I didn’t buy the IPO. Someone else speculated it’s because I used a VPN.
Either way, reddit’s official stance is that I was harassing users. When I asked what part of any of my 3 messages was threatening, the reply I got didn’t even address my question. Instead it just said my comments were reviewed by a team of humans who deemed my comments to be harassment.
To this day, I still don’t believe any human actually looked at my comments.