Censorship requires consensus,
not authority.
Koven is the first public-square chat platform where no single moderator can silence you. Every visibility decision is a community vote, weighted by reputation, logged forever, and decays automatically.
No voice is silenced unless the parties involved arrive at a just consensus.
No moderator with a banhammer. No founder with veto. No platform owner who can erase you because they had a bad day. The community speaks, the community decides, the community keeps a public record.
All the polish of Discord. None of the banhammer.
Voice, video, threads, reactions, file sharing, presence, custom emoji. With one foundational change: moderation is a community function, not an individual one.
Anyone can flag, no one decides alone
Hiding a message requires a community vote, weighted by reputation. Both a minimum count of distinct flaggers and a minimum combined score must clear before anything is touched.
Public, append-only audit log
Every flag, every vote, every collapse is logged forever, with names attached. If your speech is silenced here, it is silenced in the open.
Sanctions decay automatically
Slow-mode, off-default-feed, read-only. All time-bound, all self-expiring. There is no path from "the community didn't like what you said" to a permanent removal.
No bans. No shadow-bans.
Bans simply do not exist on Koven. Server admins can keep the lights on and set instance branding, and that's it. They cannot ban, hide, or override a vote.
Reputation comes from contribution
Vote weight is earned by participating, not by being friends with the founder. The engine is open and inspectable. No black box.
Floor-violation lane, abuse-checked
CSAM, credible threats, doxxing collapse instantly without a vote. Abuse of the floor lane eats into the flagger's reputation under public review.
Federated, Koven-only
Built on Matrix, but federates only with other Koven instances. The governance primitive is symmetric across the whole network. No one server can silence another.
End-to-end encrypted DMs
Direct messages use Matrix megolm by default. Encrypted rooms bypass the consensus layer because the bot can't see them. The UI tells you exactly when that's the case.
Self-host the whole stack
One install script brings up Synapse, Postgres, coturn, the engine, and Caddy with auto-renewing TLS. Run your own server. Keep your own data.
Voice, video, threads, reactions
Everything modern chat does. Real-time presence. File sharing. Custom emoji. Threads that actually thread. Voice and video over WebRTC with a built-in TURN.
Open protocol, open code
MIT licensed. Source on GitHub. The governance event types (flag, collapse, censure) are documented and re-implementable. No lock-in.
No telemetry, no surveillance
Koven doesn't phone home. There is no analytics pixel. Your server, your logs, your call.
From flag to consensus, in the open.
Four steps, zero secret moderator chats. Every action is a public Matrix event of a documented type.
Anyone can flag any message
Pick a category. Add a reason. The flag is a public Matrix event, signed by you, visible to the room.
Reputation-weighted aggregation
The engine combines flags from distinct accounts into a weighted score. Both count and weight have to cross documented thresholds.
Message collapses, not deletes
The message is hidden behind a click-to-expand affordance with a link to the public reasons. The text itself is never destroyed.
Sanctions expire on their own
Slow-mode, off-default-feed, and read-only states all decay over time. No appeal queue, no perma-bans, no exiles.
Speech, kept honest by the people doing the speaking.
Sign up free on koven.chat, or stand up your own server in five minutes and join the federation.