The encrypted Discord alternative, hosted by the company.

Armada tells you communities need no host and no company sits in the middle. The site at armada.buzz loads Soapbox's relays, Soapbox's voice server, Soapbox's link-preview proxy, a Discord bridge that keeps an admin role, and a tracking script the privacy policy says is not there.

Concord, the protocol for Armada's default communities, does encrypt chat on the device. The essays apply that sentence to the whole product: Buzz workspaces, relay servers, bridged Discord channels, file uploads, and the website itself. Checked 7 October 2026, against the JavaScript that site was serving and against Soapbox's own posts.

7 Oct 2026
Build stamp in the live HTML: 14:28:02Z.
11 July 2026
Date on the in-app privacy policy.
Off, in writing
That policy says this build collects no analytics.
On, in the HTML
The page loads Plausible and an error reporter anyway.

What this site is

Armada is a Discord-shaped chat client from Soapbox, the group behind Ditto. You can open it on the web, install an Android app, or download desktop builds. Communities of the default kind use Concord, which wraps messages so a relay stores ciphertext. The client also speaks NIP-29, the relay-hosted group protocol Block's Buzz app uses, and it can mirror a Discord server through bridge.armada.buzz.

Public complaint threads were thin for months. The July posts on r/DiscordAlternatives are mostly the team inviting people in. On 7 October 2026 a thread titled "regarding armada" pointed at Gleason's own 2019 essay against what he calls transgender ideology, and at the Mastodon instance that deleted his account over it. The same developer was head of engineering at Truth Social. The screen that app showed the public was his Soapbox front end, forked from Gab. The essay, the Gab post, and that job are on Who ships it. The record that decides the product claims is still theirs: the marketing essays, the privacy policy and terms baked into the app, the developer notes, and the bundle armada.buzz served on the day this page was written.

Read the claims Read the bundle

The short version

No host, on their host

The live page description says communities need no host. Derek Ross's self-host guide, 30 July 2026, lists three pieces that still sit on Soapbox: the web app, the default relays, and the voice server. Voice, he writes, needs a real server because audio does not travel the way messages do. The guide then says you can take all three back. Out of the box you have not.

Every community, except the other kinds

M. K. Fain's comparison essay says Armada encrypts every community end to end, and that relays see sealed ciphertext with the sender and the community name hidden. The same essay sells Buzz workspaces and a Discord bridge. Buzz is a NIP-29 relay: the operator holds the room. The client's own voice code says a NIP-29 call has no media encryption, because the relay's media server is trusted. The bridge wizard, in the live app, makes you tick a box: bridged channels are copied to Discord in plaintext, and the bridge keeps an admin role.

Concord chat is the part that matches the slogan. A Concord attachment is encrypted before upload. A Concord call refuses to connect if the encryption worker fails. NIP-29 groups, Buzz workspaces, and bridged Discord channels are separate modes, and the same sentence does not describe them.

The privacy policy describes a different website

The policy inside the app is dated 11 July 2026. It says Armada does not operate the relays, and that content on Nostr is public by default. Soapbox's own homepage says Soapbox operates relay.ditto.pub. That relay is one of the two default app relays in the bundle served on 7 October.

The same policy picks a paragraph based on a build flag. In this deployment the flag is empty, so the page says this build collects no analytics, no tracking cookies, and no telemetry. The HTML document around that app loads /_npanel/script.js, which starts Plausible for the domain armada.buzz and records location.href, and /_npanel/errors.js, which keeps a trail of clicks, navigations, and request URLs and ships it with an error report. The app's own analytics code goes out of its way to strip pubkeys and invite secrets before they are reported. The host script does not use that sanitizer.

The key lives in localStorage

Terms, dated 28 August 2026, say that if you sign in with a secret key, Armada stores it on your device and never sends it to the developers. On the web build, "on your device" is localStorage.setItem. Desktop builds encrypt that value when the operating system provides a store, and fall back to plaintext when they do not. Android uses the system keystore. There is no iPhone app. iPhone users are on the website, which is the plaintext path. The signup flow generates a key and logs you in with it. The policy recommends a browser extension. The default path does not use one.

Truth Social, then Armada

Alex Gleason built the screen on Truth Social. Reuters, 17 July 2023: Trump Media hired him in January 2022 as head of engineering and used Soapbox as the front end of Donald Trump's app. He resigned that day to work on Soapbox full time. On Citadel Dispatch, 13 June 2025, he said he was "on Donald Trump's social media team building the new website for Donald Trump after he was banned off of Twitter," that the Truth Social web interface "is based on Soapbox," and that "it doesn't say Soapbox anywhere in the UI." He called it "the Donald Trump version of Mastodon."

His December 2022 release note puts the products in order. Soapbox "started out as a fork of Gab's 2019 UI," was "originally created for the feminist platform Spinster," and "now powers Truth Social." Spinster is the server he and M. K. Fain stood up. Armada is the next app from the same company, sold as a hostless Discord alternative with no company in the middle.

He calls himself a transphobe

In August 2022 Gleason wrote, "This is, of course, because I'm a transphobe," because he does not believe "faceless anime avatars online should have political influence over women's restrooms and sports." The 2019 essay calls transgender identity a "dogmatic cult" and a "fiction," says sex cannot be changed, "nor can race or species," and defines a trans woman as "a male who identifies as a woman." Todon.nl deleted his account for that essay on 19 April 2019.

Gab is the interface he later forked. In the 2019 post about his ban he describes "literal Nazis" on Gab, users who "advocate for the extermination of races of people." He writes that a mass shooter used the site, linking coverage of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, and that "Blocking Gab promotes extremism, because extremism is born out of alienation." He argues the rest of Mastodon should stop blocking it. He also writes that he is Persian, that "white heritage" politics are opposed to him, and that he is not a Nazi. The Nazis in that document are the users he is asking the network to keep. Fain writes Armada's marketing. Promptworks fired her in July 2019 over an essay she titled "Non-binary is the new 'not like other girls,' and it's deeply rooted in misogyny." She then started Spinster and 4W. Her Henhouse rules revoke the identity of men. The quotes are on Who ships it.

Unbannable, on a relay they can refuse

The comparison essay says a platform-wide ban is technically impossible, because no company issued your key. The terms say relays and communities enforce their own rules, and that you can block any user inside the app. Fain's earlier post about Henhouse, the women-only relay she runs, is the precise version: they cannot stop you from speaking on the open protocol, and they can revoke the identity on their relay and drop you from the local timeline. Armada's default relays are theirs. A community owner can remove you from that community. The slogan drops the half she already wrote down.

What holds up

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