About DCTS
When DCTS was first created, it wasnt meant to become a serious project. It started as a simple CSS skill check to see whether a basic chat UI could be built with plain HTML and CSS. Later, curiosity about WebSockets and real-time data exchange turned that experiment into a basic chat prototype using socket.io.
The shift
Back then there was a small community discord server with about 2000 members. Moderation was a bit annoying, so custom bots had been developed. Annoyingly, members would join with alt accounts, mass-messaging members via direct messages causing chaos.
It was reported to discord many times and something out of the control of the average discord user. Due to lack of action from Discord, it was determined that the server will be deleted as this was a very annoying issue.
Looking for alternatives
After some time in 2023 research went into looking for alternatives. Sadly every alternative to discord had some sort of deal breaker or issue. Issues varied from a toxic project culture, poor software design, limited perspective, big egos and feature-locks, all of which question the long-term success of each alternative.
Birth of DCTS
After the search for proper alternatives failed, the simple test site was turned into a real project, with the goal of creating a real alternative that keeps all these issues and mistakes from others in mind and to avoid them.
As someone who grew up with TeamSpeak³ the rough idea was set: make something that gives people as much control as TeamSpeak did but with a modern and user-friendly UI like a service similar to discord. In other words: trying to combine the best of the two worlds.
There were many cool features that some of the alternatives had. Guilded for example had a cool feature where a server could have multiple groups each with their own channel list. The rough goal was to bring all the good parts together.
The ultimate goal
The general goal with DCTS is to provide a communication platform that is decentralized while feeling like a centralized service by making servers communicate with each other so that each server can show a list of other servers.
In addition to that each server is serving built-in web client. This way there are no version conflicts and the user interface looks mostly the same which is important for the feeling of a centralized-like user experience.
Development
There are no real roadmaps for DCTS in order to keep development as flexible and stress-free as possible. There are some exceptions but announcements about features are usually not made until they're being worked on.
Generally development is based on user feedback and curiosity. DCTS was originally only a community chat solution similar to services like Discord and Guilded, but has introduced a messenger-like system into the desktop client and mobile app. It can be roughly described as "like Signal but self-hosted".
Development can seem pretty random. For example when the DM system was created, it was thought to be cool if it would support end-to-end encryption, so that was implemented as well.