Chat That
Respects You
Yufony is a group chat app that isn't trying to harvest your data at every turn. We're doing everything we can to keep things private, and only compromising when it genuinely makes the experience better.
Yufony is a group chat app that isn't trying to harvest your data at every turn. We're doing everything we can to keep things private, and only compromising when it genuinely makes the experience better.
It's just a chat app. But one that respects you.
Channels, roles, voice chat. The stuff you're used to. We just took out the part where a company owns all of it.
DMs are always end-to-end encrypted. Communities can opt in too. Nobody running the infrastructure can read your conversations. Not even us.
Run your own seed node. No dependence on our servers, no platform that can shut you down. Your community lives on infrastructure you control.
No email, no phone number, no sign-up form. Your identity is a key pair generated on your device. We never ask who you are because we don't need to know.
Reactions, roles, permissions, voice. We're not asking you to give up features just because we care about privacy. You shouldn't have to choose.
Voice channels and screen sharing, peer-to-peer. Audio goes directly between you and the people in the call. It doesn't pass through a server we run.
We're not hiding how this works. Here's what's actually going on under the hood.
When you first open Yufony, an Ed25519 key pair is generated on your device. Your public key is your user ID. Pick a display name and avatar, and that's it. There's no account creation because there's no account. Your identity lives on your device and nowhere else.
A community is really just a signed document: its name, channels, roles, and rules, signed by whoever created it. It doesn't "live" on a server the way a Discord server does. It's a portable definition that members carry with them.
When you send a message, it's signed with your key and sent to other members via GossipSub (a publish/subscribe protocol). Everyone who receives it can verify it actually came from you. When peers are online together, messages flow directly between them.
Direct messages use X25519 key exchange derived from your identity key. They're encrypted so that only the person you're talking to can read them. Not the seed node operator, not us, nobody. Communities can opt into the same thing with rotating group keys.
Seed nodes are always-on peers that store messages when you're offline, help people find each other, and keep things running smoothly. Every community needs at least one, but you can run your own. You don't have to rely on ours. We're being honest: seeds are important infrastructure, not an optional extra.
Member lists, channel names, roles: all of this is kept in sync using CRDTs (Conflict-free Replicated Data Types). There's no central coordinator deciding what's "correct." If someone goes offline and comes back, things just merge together automatically. It's one of those things that should be invisible when it works, and it works.
We're not going to pretend we've solved privacy perfectly. But here's what we actually do and why.
We never ask for your email or phone number because we genuinely don't need them. Your identity is a key on your device. We can't leak what we don't have.
Encryption uses X25519 + NaCl. Messages are signed with Ed25519. We'd rather the security come from cryptography than from asking you to trust us.
We don't track what communities you browse or who you talk to. The simplest way to protect your data from breaches is to never collect it in the first place.
Direct messages are end-to-end encrypted, always. No opt-in, no setting to toggle. The person you're talking to is the only one who can read it.
Communities can be fully end-to-end encrypted or public. Encrypted means nobody, not even whoever runs the seed, can read messages. Public means moderation tools work better. It's your community, so it's your call.
Seed nodes need to know who's online and who's in which community to do their job, that's how offline delivery and sync work. Like any peer-to-peer app, direct connections between peers mean peers can see each other's network addresses. If that matters to you, use a VPN. We're working on reducing what seeds need to know, but we won't pretend it's zero today.
Yufony is still being built. Leave your email and we'll let you know when you can try it. That's the only thing we'll use it for.
You're on the list. We'll be in touch.
Questions, feedback, or just want to say hi?