Your community. Your platform. Your rules.
Sovereign Stoa is the self-hosted community platform that finally puts a real forum and real-time chat in one product with native apps for web, mobile, and desktop built in from day one.
Stuck Between Two Bad Options
Community operators have been stuck choosing for years. One path gets you ownership. The other gets you a platform people actually want to use. Nobody's offered both until now.
Legacy community software like MyBB and vBulletin get the fundamentals right. You own your community completely, and its content is indexed and searchable. But it was built for a web that doesn't exist anymore. It never truly adapted to mobile, let alone the native apps or even TV and console interfaces that communities expect to reach members on today.
Today's popular options feel great but none of what your community builds belongs to you. Conversations on Discord aren't searchable, aren't indexed by search engines, and can vanish the moment the platform changes its rules. And nothing built on Reddit is actually owned by the community.
Sovereign Stoa: Own It & Love Using It.
Stoa is a searchable and SEO-friendly forum with a real-time chat experience in one self-hosted product on web, mobile, and desktop from day one. No decade-old interface. No rented platform. No trade-off to make.
What Makes Sovereign Stoa Different
Forum and Chat. Actually Together.
Persistent, searchable threads for the discussions worth keeping; real IRC-style channels for the real-time conversation. One login, one admin panel, one product.
Native. Not a Bolt-On.
A real mobile app and a real desktop app ship alongside the browser app. Not a paid third-party wrapper or a stripped-down PWA.
Yours, Outright.
Self-hosted. No license fee. No rented platform. Deploy it with Docker on your own server and it's yours forever.
Room to Grow.
Start as a single small forum. Turn on Spaces when you're ready to host sub-communities and let your users create their own groups under one roof.
One product. Three ways to use it.
Sovereign Stoa ships as a Browser App, a Mobile App, and a Desktop App all consuming the same backend, released together, and versioned together. There's no 'coming eventually' mobile app, and no separate purchase for a native experience.
Forum & Content
Categories, forums, and subforums. Threads and posts with a Lexical rich-text editor. Quote and multi-quote. @mentions, polls, and thread ratings.
Real-Time Channels
IRC-style text channels with typing indicators, presence, pinned messages, announcements, and reactions with moderations options like slow mode, mute, and delete.
Spaces
Build your own Discord or Reddit competitor with admin- and user-created sub-communities, each with their own forums, channels, roles, and join flows. One instance, many communities.
Built in the Open
Sovereign Stoa is public from day one. The architecture, the roadmap, and the day-to-day progress are all out in the open. Follow the devlog to watch it take shape.
For Developers
Sovereign Stoa is a TypeScript monorepo with a framework-agnostic core and swappable adapters for auth, database, and frontend. If you'd rather read code than marketing copy, start with the architecture overview.
What's Next
Sovereign Stoa is self-hosted only, and it always will be for operators who want that. We're also laying the groundwork for an optional hosted version for operators who'd rather not run their own server. It's very early. If that's useful to you, join the list.