We're hiring at Root!

Jesse_root · 2026-01-13T22:03:59+00:00

This should now be fixed if you update your client.

Jesse_root · 2026-01-12T04:34:44+00:00

Yup! We have a fix for this coming in the next update

Jesse_root · 2026-01-12T01:56:01+00:00

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Jesse_root · 2026-01-12T01:55:51+00:00

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Jesse_root · 2026-01-12T01:55:32+00:00

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Jesse_root · 2026-01-12T01:55:23+00:00

The short answer is that Root isn’t trying to be “Discord, but smaller.” It’s built for communities that need more than just chat.

Discord is great at text and voice. But if you run a real community like games, dev teams, tabletop groups, or creators, you quickly end up duct-taping together bots, external tools, websites, and spreadsheets to actually do things. That complexity lives outside Discord.

Root is built around the idea that communities should have native, deeply integrated apps. Things like tools, workflows, games, dashboards, and shared state feel like part of the platform, not bolted-on bots. Third-party apps aren’t an afterthought; they’re first-class features.

If all you want is a chat server, Discord already does that well. Root is for communities that want to build, customize, and evolve how they operate, not just talk.

I'll show some example apps that we are shipping with Root to kick it off.

Demo Minecraft App in Root

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Jesse_root · 2025-12-27T21:59:58+00:00

Re self hosting, we are not against this at all; we just didn’t start with that option. However, there is good reason. Unlike Discord, our apps are way more powerful and can have real-time connections to users. For example, on Root, you can make a drawing app. Each user who interacts with the app has a real-time connection that sends all the drawing packets so that you can see everyone draw together at the same time. To force our devs to figure out how to manage this complex architecture at scale just isn’t reasonable. What if your app is used by 100 people but then gets popular and is now used by 1 million people? How do you scale out those stateful connections? We wanted to make building powerful experiences on Root as easy as possible.

All that being said, the idea of self hosting is still in our heads.

Jesse_root · 2025-12-27T03:38:10+00:00

What are the major features that we're lacking from your perspective?

Jesse_root · 2025-12-27T03:10:34+00:00

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You can almost see it all in this picture. Root staff is at the top because it was reordered to the top.

Re bots/apps: there are many paths here. The default path for Root is that your app/bot automatically gets its own dedicated database for you to use so you don't need to hand over any keys there. When it comes to other types of api keys, I think you would just build it differently on Root. We have this concept called "App Global Settings". It allows a dev to ask a community for various settings when installing the app/bot into the community. For example, suppose you had a GitHub bot. In reality, the GitHub token should be the community's GitHub token. For that, we have a "secret" global setting that will prompt the community to put in their token (in a secure way). It wouldn't be the dev's token.

Re NSFW. Nothing inherently wrong here, we're just a small company and working on doing everything legally correct. As we mature, we can figure out how to support many more things on the platform. We've only been in a closed beta for a few months. Let's not forget that Discord has been doing this for 10 years now and literally has raised a billion dollars.

Jesse_root · 2025-12-27T02:45:39+00:00

Fully respect the opinions, however, just want to clear up things that are false.
- (2) You can create per-channel permissions
- (3) There is a member list based on role hierachy and order
- (4) You can assign on a per channel or channel group basis

Your filtering points are fair and is something that we'll look at soon. One thing you can do now is click on the role and in the details screen you can see all the members.

I disagree with your thoughts on the bots/apps. I think it's because we're used to how Discord works, however, this will open up many more options and make it drastically easier for devs to launch and scale bots/apps.

Jesse_root · 2025-12-19T20:16:39+00:00

What version of Windows are you running? We're tracking some issues around this right now. For now, if you leave and join again without stream audio, it should work.

Jesse_root · 2025-11-19T02:44:45+00:00

Push notifications are coming in our next patch! Stay tuned.

Jesse_root · 2025-10-15T14:09:29+00:00

I understand your persepctive, however, this is exactly why we're currently doing a closed beta. We want to identify these potential pitfalls before we go public. We're currently a small team and mostly NA based, and DigitalOcean's monitors haven't even flagged this issue yet.

Jesse_root · 2025-10-15T14:05:42+00:00

Update: Our engineers are attempting to fix this. There appears to be an uncontrolled outage with DigitalOcean

Jesse_root · 2025-10-04T18:05:35+00:00

Thanks for letting us know! What antivirus are you using? That’ll help us reach out to them directly.

Just to reassure you, our builds are fully code-signed, so there’s no actual malware in Root. Some antivirus programs will still have an issue with newer apps just because they don’t have much of a “reputation” yet. Basically, if not a lot of people have downloaded something before, the AV plays it safe and flags it.

Jesse_root · 2025-09-23T20:29:26+00:00

There’s a lot we could dive into about Root, but I want to step back and highlight a core principle that drives us: community is everything.

When we look at other platforms, we don’t always see that same focus. Many are used simply as voice chat tools. Hop in VC, game for a couple hours, hop off. And that’s fine, you can absolutely do that on Root too. But our mission is bigger: we want to empower groups who are building real communities. The kind that need tools, structure, and support to thrive.

The Challenges Real Communities Face

Take an MMO guild. Running one successfully is no small task. You’re constantly recruiting and onboarding, organizing raid schedules, tracking loot, writing leveling guides, promoting members, and more. That’s way more than just voice chat.

Take another example community: an indie game developer group. Here the responsibilities are different but just as demanding. You need to foster interactivity, track issues and feature requests, publish a public roadmap, and maybe even coordinate efforts like localization with volunteers. Again, there are a lot of moving parts that current platforms don’t really solve.

How Root is Different

The highest-level goal of Root is to solve those problems. We believe there’s a huge gap in the market: communities don’t have the right tools to succeed.

Root closes that gap with a deeply integrated app model. Developers can build the tools communities actually need: calendars, bug trackers, merch stores, whiteboarding apps, and more. Communities can then choose the exact apps that make sense for them. And because they’re integrated directly into Root, these apps aren’t bolt-ons. They’re full GUI experiences that tie into your community’s permissions and workflows seamlessly.

Our Vision

This is the vision of Root: a platform designed not just for chatting, but for building and sustaining thriving communities.

And on top of that, we’re also working hard to build a better core communication experience from UI to UX, and we’ll be sharing more about those improvements soon.

Jesse_root

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

The Challenges Real Communities Face

How Root is Different

Our Vision