
Announcing Armada Stack
Alex Gleason, 10/12/2026, 39 engagements
I create software that empowers people online. I'm vegan btw.

Alex Gleason, 10/12/2026, 39 engagements

Alex Gleason, 6/28/2026, 21 engagements

Alex Gleason, 6/12/2026, 4 engagements
Reverse engineered AirPlay between my laptop and Steam Deck
10/17/2026, 27 engagements
Ditto has a new Blossom server written in Rust, that is up to 170x faster than the original blossom-server in Deno lol https://blossom.ditto.pub/
10/17/2026, 51 engagements
ZFS is destroying my write performance. Now I understand why ext4 is still the default.
10/16/2026, 22 engagements
But it’s time to let this go now. Not because it wasn’t worth it, but because we’ve given it everything we had, and there isn’t any more to give.
10/16/2026, 3 engagements
I forked boxedwine and had opencode optimize the wasm build for about 24 hours straight. Got old Windows programs running somewhat reliably on Rainbow Player with it.



10/14/2026, 12 engagements
They said I use AI so much I probably can't even code by hand anymore. So I created this site to test if that's true. Still got it, baby. https://jsbat.shakespeare.wtf


10/14/2026, 6 engagements
TIL that Monero is mineable on consumer hardware and having a GPU or ASIC doesn't even help


10/13/2026, 78 engagements
I created an ngit-mirror daemon that automatically mirrors all of our Soapbox ngit repos to GitHub so it shows up in search and dummies can find it. Sorry to Jeff Cliff.
10/13/2026, 6 engagements
So it turns out Tor's Rust implementation sucks. But their process to submit patches is too hard to do, so I'm just going to maintain a superior fork that they don't know exists.
10/13/2026, 11 engagements
They reported our posts so hard the mods of this subreddit are asking for help with moderation. https://www.reddit.com/r/DiscordAlternatives/comments/1x4i03t/looking_for_new_moderators/
10/13/2026, 8 engagements
Those tiny little black mosquitoes are the fucking devil
10/13/2026, 6 engagements
Plz upvote, and don't neglect the comments. These people don't want us to win.
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10/12/2026, 6 engagements
Armada Stack announced! https://www.reddit.com/r/DiscordAlternatives/comments/1x4f0s0/selfhosting_armada/
10/12/2026, 5 engagements
Ditto Relay (relay.ditto.pub) is now available over Tor 😎 ws://ditto3gnoedy3ld6vh2l6hynla2meuszaggtblxtyhcycgb7a6o3xcad.onion
10/12/2026, 15 engagements
npanel is now available as a Debian repo and a RedHat repo: https://pkg.soapbox.pub/deb/soapbox.pub/npanel
10/12/2026, 3 engagements
Ditto Relay is now available as a Debian repo and RedhoHat repo: https://pkg.soapbox.pub/deb/soapbox.pub/ditto-relay
10/12/2026, 3 engagements
It seems what's stopping a drop-in replacement to Windows at this point is not a technical barrier. It's that Valorant, League of Legends, Fortnite, Apex, Destiny 2, Roblox and Siege actively detect and block your account if you run the game through Linux.
10/11/2026, 14 engagements
This fat fuck is gonna spend his happily ever after in a forest park 10 miles away


10/11/2026, 9 engagements
These little guys are so intelligent. Whenever I see them they're investigating something (or me) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anolis
10/10/2026, 9 engagements


10/10/2026, 2 engagements
"The underlying ideas are sound"


10/10/2026, 12 engagements
We will support the Deno runtime for another year with monthly releases containing bug fixes and security updates. After that year we will end our development of the Deno runtime. Deno will remain open source, and we welcome others who want to continue its development.
10/9/2026, 1 engagement
RIP Deno. You did a lot. https://deno.com/blog/cloudflare
10/9/2026, 6 engagements
I keep buying that delicious fresh-baked soft and fluffy french bread from HEB, don't eat it immediately then get disappointed when it's hard as a rock 2 days later.
10/9/2026, 2 engagements
I rewrote Ditto Relay from scratch in Rust. It's 5x faster than strfry. It supports NIP-50 full-text search. It's backed by LMDB + Tantivy. Migration complete and now live on relay.ditto.pub!


10/9/2026, 24 engagements
I posted it on Reddit. Let's see how this goes! https://www.reddit.com/r/DiscordAlternatives/comments/1x15pmf/armadaexposed_exposed/
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10/8/2026, 3 engagements
In response to armada.exposed, I created armadaexposed.exposed 😂 https://armadaexposed.exposed
10/8/2026, 6 engagements
I'm migrating Ditto Relay to a new system. Recent events (and profiles etc) are already migrated. The full historical backlog will be available in the next 6-9 hours.
10/8/2026, 1 engagement


10/8/2026, 2 engagements
I did Microsoft's humiliation ritual of scanning the front and back of my government ID, scanning my face twice, on top of paying them $10/mo just to make Armada.exe not display the "unsafe" warning they created. I still have to wait 1-20 days for their response. They're a mafia.
10/8/2026, 6 engagements
I love you, Nostr.
10/8/2026, 2 engagements
Guys, I think Bernie can still win.
10/8/2026, 3 engagements
They're calling a vote to ban Armada on the DiscordAlternatives Reddit 👻 https://www.reddit.com/r/DiscordAlternatives/comments/1x042lj/mod_can_we_ban_armada_from_rdiscordalternative/
10/7/2026, 4 engagements
I'm getting cancelled on Reddit, guys. It's so over 😭😂 https://www.reddit.com/r/DiscordAlternatives/comments/1wzpjdg/regarding_armada_tw_politics/
10/7/2026, 1 engagement
npanel now has a mini Sentry built in 🤠


10/7/2026, 2 engagements
The symbol for Nostr should be a key. Not a stupid ostrich. GM
10/7/2026, 8 engagements
Web of Trust doesn't work. Because too many of you dummies are following
who is running a bot farm manipulating trends.
10/7/2026, 3 engagements
"Nostr is too hard to use. People will never figure out private keys"


10/6/2026, 12 engagements
First Armada release published with "ngit release" instead of zsp 👀
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I had a nightmare that I was 36. I woke up and started to type the year into the calculator. 2016- wait FUCK it's 2026. Where did this decade go? Anyway I'm only 33 so everything is okay... for now
10/6/2026, 1 engagement
you're just a condom between Claude and your production server getting fucked
10/5/2026, 1 engagement
npanel now embeds a full JavaScript runtime (QuickJS) allowing individual nsites to render their own dynamic link previews to crawlers. nsites serve /.well-known/npanel/preview.js which takes a Request object and renders an og-image, title, etc.


10/5/2026, 2 engagements
You can now migrate your post history from Mastodon and Pleroma to Nostr using this tool: https://mostr.pub/migrate
10/5/2026, 7 engagements
I'm still deliberating on this. I thought it made sense when I added it. But
made a very good point that AUTH inextricably links your IP address to your pubkey as a user. Normal Nostr queries don't do that. So it's a difficult choice. AUTH is arguably worse for privacy.
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Soapbox (the original Fediverse software) has been renamed back to Soapbox FE.
Should relay AUTH even exist? Pros: it's better for privacy. Cons: it's worse for privacy.
10/4/2026, 2 engagements
Is your relay running? ... well you better go catch it
10/4/2026, 2 engagements
I compiled Tor directly into npanel. And added TLS support with automatic cert renewal. So you don't even need Caddy in front of it. You can just run it on a server and point a domain at it and everything "just works"
10/3/2026, 1 engagement
:trillian-lol:
Discord sucks. protocols > platforms
Your hate fills me with power.
Vote Vampire Boy
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New Wisp just dropped :wisp_lazor:
Get fucked, gooners.


LMAO we should generate a badge award for this
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This is actually what we’d expect for B-trees: they’re faster the fewer keys you have in them.
I occasionally open X to check that my crossposter still works. I see that Josh Adams liked my post, and then I scroll through a few of the dumbest takes of all time before closing the tab and coming back to Ditto / Nostr.
poster.place reverse-bridged Nostr and now every Nostr event is being duplicated into ActivityPub and then re-bridged into Nostr without proxy tags. I wonder if this could create an infinite loop.
10/1/2026, 1 engagement
Who should I add to my Top 8?
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Making a healthy peanut butter banana spinach smoothie and then pouring Pepsi Max® into it.
It's been a while since I've had an adversarial relationship with my own users. That's how you know you're #winning
Discord sucks. Use Armada.
I prompted Opus 5.5 "port Armada to SolidJS" and it took about 6 hours but it actually fucking did it. It looks perfect, 1:1, functionality is all perfect. I can't even tell the difference at all. The bundle size is only like 14% smaller and the performance boost isn't proven yet, so I'm not going to pull the trigger yet. I just wanted to see if it was possible. Several years ago, Sonnet 3.5 couldn't tell the difference between SolidJS and React and kept fucking everything up. Now it can do it. Potential wins for mkstack across the board if we convert everything to SolidJS.
The left pic is human engineering. The right pic is vibe coding after destroying and recreating the codebase 5 times and protocolizing it.


Although I still dislike Rust, if it improves performance that much it's basically a moral imperative for self-hosting freedom tech. It means it can run on lower-end (old or recycled) hardware, costs less to run, and uses less energy so it's literally better for people and the environment. I was against it because it made it harder to develop on and harder for people to contribute. It is anti-inclusive. Those things are still true. But AI is making those points no longer relevant. I still think that what we call "apps" should be built for the web, because the web is the greatest software distribution platform of all time. The benefits there still far outweigh the tradeoffs. But for servers, Rust does make sense. Especially since the future we're working towards has as few different types of servers as possible. Internet infrastructure will be standardized into Nostr relays, Blossom servers, bots, and gateways. For those backbone services that serve thousands of users, performance matters more than developer inclusivity. For "apps" that serve one user on their own device, inclusivity and ease of distribution matters more.
Upgrading Bun from 1.3 to 1.4 cut my CPU usage in half on npanel.


I used to think what made me different is that I'm brave. But it's actually because I'm honest. My honesty is why people love and hate me. It wasn't until I was pushed to be dishonest that I understood this. But I've decided to stay honest.
I feel a lot of excitement.
Delete Merlin. Use Birdstar.
9/29/2026, 2 engagements
npanel got a major overhaul. It now supports built-in analytics. Plus a redesign and performance improvements.


I ported Ditto Relay to Rust and it's 5x faster. I hate Rust but it seems almost immoral not to do this.
9/29/2026, 1 engagement
Blusky can only post 300 characters? What is this, 2009?
I will defend my engagement bait post: private keys are large random numbers. Authentication tokens are large random numbers. UUIDs are large random numbers. Passwords are large deterministic numbers. Passkeys, 2-factor auth, and similar work off large random numbers. Small random numbers can be guessed quickly. Medium random numbers can be guessed slowly. Large random numbers can be guessed in millennia, which is only considered a long time relative to a human's lifespan. Large "unguessable" numbers is the basis of all computer encryption and authentication. But no number is truly "unguessable". It just takes longer to guess, because it is more obscure. Economics are still in play. "Security" colloquially is relative to human lifespans, but truly no such thing can exist absolutely. Only levels of obscurity exist. Therefore, all security is obscurity. Ya bunch of dumbasses.
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Security by obscurity IS security. This is in fact how virtually all cryptographic functions and authentication works.
"All software is apps" wrong. All software is plug-ins.
This is an AI reenactment of an event that actually took place in my backyard last night for real.


Armada has hit the front page of Hacker News. 110+ upvotes. #winning https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49873048
I think Steve Jobs is wrong in that famous clip with the heckler. If you start from the "costumer experience" we should have flying cars by now. You need engineering to know what's within the realm of possibility. It's not one or the other - it's a balance.
Reimplementing like half a web browser from scratch on iOS because iOS sucks. Starting with IndexedDB.
The new MySpace is doing great. These idiots can't even vibe code.


I set my birthday on Threads to January 1st, 1970 and all it showed me was boomers and thirst-traps. There's a post that says "good morning to everyone who's too old for this shit."
What else should I bridge xnostr to? LinkedIn?
Cool shit only exists on Nostr. Everything else is herculean even in the age of AI. You can just do things on Nostr.
Rainbow Player code is here: https://gitworkshop.dev/[email protected]/relay.ngit.dev/rainbow-player It's still under development and it's a side-side-side project. Just something I wish to exist.
Rainbow Player on Steam Deck 👀
I'm now crossposting to both X and Bluesky from Nostr through xnostr on Tenna. Running entirely on my device.


Hello Bluesky
This is so fucking awesome. OpenClaw-like AI agent running on my Android phone through a foreground service registered in a ServiceWorker from an nsite in Tenna. NIP-17 interop so I can talk to it through Armada on any device and it answers from my phone. As a user all I had to do was click a button.




The web is still the greatest platform. This perverted fantasy that "we can write everything in Rust now so we should" is only going to create more walled gardens.
DOOD PlayStation 2 games in Rainbow Player. 🤯 The emulation still kinds sucks. But imagine this, you insert any type of CD or DVD-ROM, and whatever it is, it "just works"


Rainbow Player can now play full DVD videos from the connected disc drive over WebUSB, lmao