Textile is a free-speech forum platform that combines the best features of Discord and Reddit. I say free-speech to mean bringing to life the 1st amendment of the United States Constitution. It organizes conversations into servers (forums, to be precise) containing threads, while allowing platform-wide search and public browsing without requiring login. Textile gives you Discord's intuitive server-and-channel structure with Reddit's discoverability without sacrificing free-speech in the process.
The name Textile reflects the platform's structure: posts are woven into threads, threads are woven into forums, and forums into the broader platform. I am a man, not a woman, but my understanding is that fabric is woven from individual threads. Likewise, user conversations on Textile are interconnected yet distinct, creating a rich tapestry of communities. Our name reflects our deliberate convictions to treat users as ends to themselves rather than as means to ends. That is, we do not reduce users to a corporate standard without explicit and prolonged consent.
In my opinion, you cannot have free speech without privacy online, or gun ownership in real life. While true that very few nations have free speech without privacy (and without citizen gun ownership), those nations also subject themselves to tremendous and perpetual international social pressure. Textile is built on the principle that your conversations should remain private and uncensored. Unlike Discord which is working to implement controversial ID/age verification despite of recent breaches of personal data, Textile doesn't discriminate based on the content of your characters (no pun intended). We believe in bringing the First Amendment to life, with minimal platform-level restrictions limited only to obscenities like CSAM.
Forums on Textile are independently moderated by their owners, not by the platform. You can customize your profile differently on each server, and your subscriptions and cross-forum activity remain private. The platform shows you a clean list of your subscribed forums with indicators for new content, without exposing you to unwanted material.
Textile is implemented in Luan, with each forum running as its own customizable Luan site. This gives forum owners unprecedented control over their communities while maintaining platform-wide features like search through distributed computing.
You can integrate these external services from the account page.
For questions, contact me. This is an open source project.