Aquilo (WIP)
March 16, 2026
This is an open source project owned by SleepingAmi
Aquilo is an open-source, self-hostable community chat platform. Think Discord, but without the surveillance, or the behavioral profiling. Built on the Hydraulisc ecosystem, it’s designed around one idea: communities should be about people, not data.
Tagline: “Light. Fast. Untouchable.”
AGPL v3 licensed. Currently in beta or early alpha, or even before that idrk tbh we just started kinda thing.
What the fuck is an aquilo?
Honestly all you need to know is discord but less ass, dooky, and shit. Aquilo has servers, channels, and messages (obv) all the usual messaging platform stuff. We are doing it a bit different though, before you can do any of the usual chatting you need to enter your public PGP key.
Security
Before a user can access anything at all, he will need to go through a challenge-response flow to verify himself:
- Upload PGP key (done right after initial login)
- Server encrypts random string using your key
- User decrypts it locally and returns the plaintext
- Server verifies if it matches No private key ever touches the server. That’s the point.
we will never touch your private key that sounds kinda weird
From there, every server gets its own AES-256-GCM encryption key. Messages are encrypted at rest in the database. Reading them requires “unlocking” the server using another PGP challenge, solved locally, stored per-session. Close the session, lose the unlock.
All user input goes through XSS sanitization and BIDI character stripping (the kind of spoofing attack most apps don’t bother defending against but im schizo cybersec nerd). httpOnly cookies, session-based auth, no analytics, no profiling, no tracking.
Tech stack
| Component | Technology |
|---|---|
| Backend | Node.js + Express 5 |
| Database | SQLite (better-sqlite3) |
| Templates | EJS |
| Frontend | Vanilla JS + CSS |
| Encryption | OpenPGP 6, AES-256-GCM |
| Auth | Hydraulisc OAuth |
Same philosophy as Linkpen: no framework overhead, no microservices, just a Node app and a SQLite file. The entire database is one file.
What im still working on
Here are some of the security features we literally just thought of:
- Zero trust
- Dont trust, very for everything
- Dead man’s switch
- auto-wipe account after being inactive for a set amount of time
- Automatic account deletion
- auto-wipe account after set amount of time
- Message timers
- self-destructing messages
- Single-view messages
- read once, gone forever
- Complete metadata removal
- im gonna speak my mind about this in a second
- User-selectable encryption
- choose your cipher per conversation, PGP-only for high-sensitivity DMs
The ideas of single-view messages and timer features are obviously ideas we got from “security” minded messengers like Signal and the like. But the metadata removal… why haven’t more apps added this?? It just doesn’t make sense to me? Also allowing people to choose their encryption, I mean encryption will be on by default but its not that hard to implement.
Official instance
We do have an official instance running at aquilo.hydraulisc.net buuuut we are still full on building everything.
The repo is on GitHub under the Hydraulisc organisation.
Final thoughts
I dont think the security standards are enough right now, and our aim is to change this with Aquilo. We will build it with real “privacy by default” in mind. But we will take it a bit more serious than other applications built by multi billion dollar orgs who seem to promise the world on marketing pages but just under-deliver.
The PGP requirement alone filters for a certain kind of user, one who has thought about their threat model.
We will continue building on Aquilo and the Hydraulisc network, not for the sake of a feature list, but out of our personal philosophies.
if you’re building for people who care about privacy, you don’t stop at encryption at rest.
You go off a cliff.