The Discord alternative with Nostr login

Obelisk is an open-source Discord alternative built on Nostr. Instead of signing up with an email or phone number, you log in with a Nostr keypair — a cryptographic identity you own and keep. It has servers, channels, voice rooms, threads, encrypted direct messages, and Web of Trust spam resistance.

No. Obelisk has no signup form. You log in with a Nostr key — via a browser extension (NIP-07), an nsec string, or a remote signer bunker (NIP-46). There is no email, no phone number, no KYC, no CAPTCHA — ever.

Nostr (Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays) is an open protocol for decentralized social networks. Your identity is a public key you control; messages are signed events published to relay servers. Because your identity is not tied to any one company, no platform can ban you off the network. Obelisk uses Nostr for login, profiles, and Web of Trust scoring.

Same UX, different foundation. Obelisk feels like Discord — servers, channels, voice, threads, reactions — but your account is a cryptographic key you own instead of an email on a corporate server. Obelisk is also open source, self-hostable, and uses Web of Trust filtering instead of email verification or CAPTCHAs.

Yes and yes. Obelisk is MIT-licensed and free to use. You can join our hosted instance at no cost, or self-host your own where you pay only for your VPS — a ~5 USD/month droplet runs a community of hundreds.

Yes — this is a first-class feature. The entire stack runs in Docker Compose: Next.js + Socket.io, PostgreSQL, and Caddy for automatic HTTPS. A 2 GB VPS handles hundreds of concurrent users. You own the database, you set the moderation policy, you pick the Nostr relays.

You can create one right from the Obelisk login screen — no extension needed. If you prefer a standalone signer, install a browser extension like Alby or nos2x (they implement NIP-07), or on mobile use a signer app like Amber (Android) or nsec.app. Keep your private key (nsec...) safe: it is your account, and no one can recover it for you.

Web of Trust. Obelisk computes a trust score for every poster by walking your server's Nostr follow graph. Real people with mutual follows from your moderators pass automatically. Brand-new pubkeys with no social signal are filtered. No email verification, no phone numbers, no CAPTCHAs.

Direct messages (DMs) are end-to-end encrypted using Nostr's private DMs (NIP-17) — only sender and recipient can read them. Channel messages are stored on the server you connect to, like Discord — visible to the server's admins and anyone with access to the channel.

Yes. Obelisk is a responsive web app that works in any mobile browser, including voice channels — audio streams over a Socket.io WebSocket relay, so it works anywhere modern browsers run (no WebRTC peer-to-peer required). A dedicated installable PWA is on the roadmap for Phase 4.