MODVC - The place for Voice Chat

#discord #privacy #webdev #programming

Modern chat applications are becoming more bloated, tracker-heavy, and vendor-locked than ever. When you build your communities on existing platforms, your data gets mined by the provider, and your bot integrations have to run heavyweight, long-lived WebSocket clients on a VM that are essentially "idling memory".

We built MODVC to solve this. It is a lightweight, privacy-first communication platform which runs entirely within the browser as a PWA (Progressive Web App) with its own dedicated peers-to-peers WebRTC voice rooms, serverless text channels, zero-knowledge End-to-End Encrypted (E2EE) Messaging, Bot REST API which is stateless, 0% fee creator monetization system, etc.

Here is the launch showcase of the platform:

Let's take a deeper dive into its architecture, security primitives, and custom systems:

1. Zero-Knowledge E2EE Messaging

Normal group chat encrypts traffic in transit, then decrypts the traffic to read messages from your database servers in order to index queries for search purposes, and to target adverts on user content.

We have zero-knowledge E2EE for one-on-one Direct Messages.

Ephemeral public/private keypairs are generated in the client directly.
Local encryption of the messages in the browser uses the Web Crypto API with an AES-GCM 256-bit cipher before the messages are sent across the wire.
We store the encrypted messages in our database (an encrypted ciphertext blob), therefore at best, with root access, you have only a block of random data, not message contents.

Here's how E2EE looks:

2. Low-Latency Voice Rooms & Custom SFU

Direct Peer to Peer connections work well for individual calls, but for group voice chats high client upload limits the utility due to high upload speeds required.

We use a hybrid approach, with:

WebRTC Direct Data Channels for peer-to-peer low-latency text chats.
SFU Media Servers (Selective Forwarding Unit) to facilitate group voice chat and screen sharing, routing media streams without decoding to keep voice latencies under 50ms while minimizing local CPU use.

3. High-Fidelity Discord-Style Interactive Polls

Engagement tools like Polls ought to be dynamic, and live. We created a custom, real-time polling system that leverages its real-time database endpoint for instant client updates without any poll or lag.

4. Threaded Community Forums

To keep conversations manageable, we abandoned flat-style chatrooms in favor of Threaded Forums. The system includes custom subdomain forums, user-tagged posts, filter-able discussions (e.g. Modvoice.modvc.org, panel.modvc.org, doodletype.modvc.org) and file uploads to Cloudflare R2.

Here is the forum user interface and file upload speed:

5. Granular Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

Servers can be completely customized regarding channel-creation privileges, user-moderation, roles management, and chat formatting rules. Channel-level permissions may optionally override the top-level guild rules entirely.

6. Zero-Fee Creator Monetization System

Platforms like Patreon or Discord take a percentage as high as 30% of a creator's profits. Our system uses peer-to-peer payments.

Creators securely link their Stripe keys directly into their MODVC Server configuration.
There is no cut taken from our platform; all Stripe transactions are direct and secure.
When a transaction has been confirmed by Stripe's webhook, our system automatically assigns your subscribers roles within the voice server.

The entire payment infrastructure is open source under the MIT license. We use a Bring Your Own Gateway (BYOG) architecture — creators generate Stripe Restricted Keys scoped only to "Write Checkout Sessions", which are then encrypted at the edge using AES-256 via a Cloudflare Pages Edge Function before being stored. The decrypted key never touches the frontend. You can audit exactly how we handle and protect creator payments here: Modvc-org/Modvoice-payment

Walkthrough of monetization configuration:

7. The Stateless Bot API & OAuth2 SSO

The traditional bots rely on having a perpetually running WebSocket client connected on a VM; this resource even when idle costs resources.

We created a stateless Bot REST API:

Registering your bot commands uses standard HTTP POST requests.
A command that is executed sends its JSON response via an HTTP POST request to your chosen server; an Edge computing instance (Cloudflare Workers or Vercel Edge) or even a simple HTTP server, at which point your bot script takes over, without an ever-running, resource-expensive process waiting on the wire.
Users can connect their MODVC accounts to third-party websites using a full OAuth2 SSO interface.

Here is the demonstration of the Bot REST API running slash command routing and webhooks:

8. Open Source & Extensible

The entire platform has been engineered to allow developers to iterate upon it, and we include a comprehensive, well-documented system for SEO (sitemaps, robots, etc.). It can also be run locally, and you can inspect the code yourself: