About
Toskr gives a team or community its own private chat server — actually yours.
Your homeserver. Your users. Your domain. Your rooms. We keep it running. We can't read your encrypted conversations even if we wanted to, and we don't make money off knowing what's inside them — we make money by hosting it well. That's the whole business model.
Same protocol as matrix.org. Use our Toskr Chat apps or any Matrix client you already like. Nothing proprietary. If you stop using us, your data goes with you to whatever you set up next.
Why this exists
Running your own Matrix server by hand is real, ongoing work: standing up Synapse and its database, getting DNS records in the right order before you can even request a certificate, keeping TLS renewed forever on every domain you add, hand-writing the federation files other servers use to find yours, bootstrapping the first admin account through a command-line handshake instead of a signup form — and then patching and backing it all up, indefinitely, on top of everything else.
Most people who want control over their communications don't want a second job to get it. We do that part. You get the server.
The trade everyone else makes
Most "free" chat platforms make a trade: you get a place to talk, and in exchange they get to read what you say and sell your attention against it. That's not a conspiracy — it's the business model. Someone pays for those servers, and if you're not paying, your data and attention are what's for sale.
Picture two apartment buildings. In one, the landlord holds a master key to every unit, because that's how the building makes its money. In the other, the locks are real — the landlord physically cannot get into your unit, and if you move out, your stuff isn't stuck in their building. Toskr is the second building. You pay us a straightforward hosting fee, and that's the entire relationship — no second business model hiding underneath it.
What we will never do
- ✓We will never sell your data.
- ✓We will never read your messages for commercial reasons.
- ✓We will never build a surveillance or profiling system — no behavioral analytics, no ad targeting, no data brokers.
- ✓We will always be honest about what encryption does and doesn't protect. End-to-end encrypted messages are beyond our reach; unencrypted messages and metadata are not, and we won't pretend otherwise.
The default is yours
Your data is yours. We host it, we don't mine it. Encrypted rooms stay encrypted; we don't hold the keys. Unencrypted rooms get the same treatment any host could give them. We operate the box, but we don't go reading.
The name
The name comes from Ratatoskr, the messenger squirrel of Norse mythology who runs up and down Yggdrasil, the world tree connecting the nine realms, carrying words between an eagle at the top and a serpent at the root. Ratatoskr's whole job is to carry what one side says to the other, faithfully, without adding anything of his own.
That's the job we've given ourselves. Toskr moves your messages between the people you're talking to — encrypted, private, and under your control. We're the tree, not the message.
Curious how it actually works, under the hood? See how Toskr works →