Hello world! My name is Mike, and I am building Textile.
Textile is a free speech platform built on a simple, flexible, and fully functional foundation. It combines a Discord-like architecture—essentially a forum enhanced with server push—with a powerful Reddit-like search function.
If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, feel free to email me at 88mmhg@proton.me
We are a small team of reactionary programmers. By "reactionary," we mean programmers who prefer tools that are mature, simple to use, and easy to maintain. Also, we have an aversion against rapidly changing ecosystems.
Textile is a free speech platform currently in development. It weaves forums and chat together into a single platform.
A textile is made from many threads woven into a durable fabric. We see communities the same way. People are the threads; relationships are the weave. Textile is designed to help families, friends, work connections, and communities stay connected even when distance, time, or circumstance would otherwise pull them apart.
In terms of pure functionality, Textile interweaves an intuitive discord-like architecture with a reddit-like search function, and one would already be hard-pressed to name another platform that pairs the two—even setting aside the issues discussed below. But functionality is not the main reason why Textile exists. Textile exists to support free speech.
Free speech is difficult to protect, because most service providers insist on some baseline of censorship. Accordingly, our solution is twofold: (1) allow free speech up to whatever limit our own servers must observe, and (2) let anyone who hits that limit self-host instead. MapReduce lets the search function keep working across those separate servers. The code, naturally, is open source.
We already have a free speech platform: Nabble. It has served its purpose, but its code has grown old and painful to maintain, and it draws spammers constantly, which has become hard to manage. The codebase has grown too brittle to develop further, so abuse a modern system would filter in minutes simply accumulates instead. Textile is meant to be what Nabble already proved was worth building—only built better this time: simple, tactile, and maintainable enough not to calcify the way Nabble did.
The obvious question, then, is why not just use something that already exists. We think the burden of proof runs the other way. Show us a platform that supports free speech, carries a low computational load, feels tactile to use, is easy to develop and maintain, and resists bugs—all five at once. Never have we found one.
Discord comes closest to tactile, but there is deep censorship, its bugs are frequent, and its computational load is heavier than it should be. Because a company that polices content that aggressively has little incentive to build a lighter, less invasive client, I suspect the load and the moderation stance are related. I cannot prove that formally, though I can offer a data point: a friend of mine got banned for a year for writing that humanity would kill the morally perfect man if he returned today and walked the Earth. From our point of view, it is morally reprehensible to punish someone in any way shape or form for writing that, regardless if what they wrote is correct or not. And we think they are correct.
Reddit, for its part, is not nearly as tactile, and its deplatforming—whatever it is called internally—functions in practice like the censorship we are trying to avoid, regardless of the mechanism behind it.
X is its own case. By some estimates, roughly 15 percent of its accounts are, or were, run by bots, which is spam by another name. X also shadowbans users over content that falls well short of the legal bar for obscenity. Since shadowbanning is sneaky, censorship on X is actually even worse than censorship on Discord. I can add a personal data point here too: I once tried to open a second account on X and was banned for being fake, which is an odd result from a platform that, by its own admission, leaves most of its actual bots untouched.
Bluesky is not the answer either, whatever my complaints about X. Its house culture leans hard in one direction, and good and healthy ideas like a conviction for traditional family formation or the idea that "cultures need to keep noise down in order to be civilized" do not seem to fare well there. Noticeable, too, is the pattern beneath it: en masse blocking, pile-ons, and constant litigating over what counts as acceptable discourse. In practice, this produces an environment that feels less open than advertised, and it alienates a lot of new/potential users by giving the impression that the app that has inherited the worst tribal habits of the older platforms it was meant to replace.
Bluesky has its own version of Discord's problem, too, just aimed at a different target: identification rather than telemetry. Age verification alone is enough to give many users pause; Bluesky goes further than that, and users in Texas, in particular, have reported being asked to verify their age directly through the platform as of 2026, under the state's age-verification rules. However well-intentioned, the practical effect is a platform that now asks for more of a person's identity than most of its competitors do.
Then there is the incident involving Vice President J. D. Vance. When he joined in mid-2025, his account was suspended within minutes of his first post just 2 hours after joining. Bluesky's own explanation was that its automated impersonation-detection system had flagged him; the account was restored and verified roughly twenty minutes later. I will let the reader decide how to read that timing.
We looked further afield as well—Stoat/Revult, Matrix, Raddle, Mastodon, Fluxor—and each fell short of the same five-part bar somewhere. But I won't bother itemizing their issues for now.
Hence: no platform we have found stacks all five requirements—free speech, low computational load, tactility, ease of development and maintenance, and bug resistance. Nabble stacks four. Textile is building the fifth so that you don't have to plead the fifth.
Textile is designed to keep your contacts and communities tightly knit-woven. Our values make this possible. We value simplicity, reliability, and usability. The beauty of these values is that they internally feed each other. For example, simplicity makes code easy to maintain and therefore communities stay reliably held together.
By simplicity, we mean conceptual minimalism. This does not mean limiting the number of features; that would be ideological minimalism, which we reject. Instead, simplicity means using the fewest concepts necessary to provide each feature. Fewer concepts make software easier to understand, easier to maintain, and ultimately more reliable.
From reliability, we derive a conviction for free speech to the extent that is legal in our jurisdiction; the suppression of such speech would be inherently condemned to undermine reliability. A communication platform is only reliable if users can reasonably expect lawful speech to remain lawful tomorrow. Textile therefore supports free speech to the extent permitted by our jurisdiction. We also minimize spam, automated abuse, and obscenities (especially CSAM).
Usability guides the overall structure of Textile. Our conviction for usability expounded to a vision we had. Namely, to interweave a powerful Reddit-like search function with an intuitive Discord-like forum architecture. Rather than treating forums and chat as separate experiences, Textile is designed to weave them together into a single platform. That way, everybody can find and participate in circles and communities they belong in.
For layout, we use HTML and CSS. For interactivity, we use JavaScript. For the backend, we use Luan. For database storage and management, we use Lucene. Mercurial is the version control system (VCS) that we use. For repository hosting, we use repositoryhosting.com.
These technologies were chosen for their maturity, simplicity, and long-term maintainability rather than their popularity.