Who ships it

Armada's essays say "we," and they say no company sits in the middle. The company is Soapbox Technology, LLC. The people who write the essays and ship the defaults are Alex Gleason and M. K. Fain. Gleason was head of engineering at Truth Social. The screen Truth Social showed the public was his Soapbox front end, forked from Gab's 2019 interface and first used for Spinster. Both of them have a long public record, in their own words, of contempt for transgender people. Gleason also wrote a defense of leaving Gab reachable after describing users there who advocate the extermination of races.

The company

The client README's extra AGPL permission is granted by Soapbox Technology, LLC. That is the copyright holder telling app stores they may carry the program. USPTO serial 99824668 is a SOAPBOX trademark filed 14 May 2026 by Soapbox Technology, LLC, a limited liability company, owner address Watertown, South Dakota 57201. The listed goods include downloadable social-media software and software "supporting global activists via censorship-resistant platforms."

The funding page says Soapbox makes no income from users or apps, runs no ads, sells no data, takes no venture capital, and has no shareholders. It says they are working toward a 501(c)(3). Donations run through And Other Stuff, their fiscal sponsor, on Open Collective Europe. Named grantors are OpenSats (Ditto, Nostrify, Shakespeare, and the surrounding work) and the Human Rights Foundation. OpenSats has funded Alex Gleason since the July 2023 Nostr grants and named him a long-term grantee on 29 August 2024.

"No shareholders" can be true of an LLC, which has members. "No company" cannot. The homepage line is "owned by no company. Not even ours." The LLC filed the mark. The iOS project in the repo sets DEVELOPMENT_TEAM = GZLTTH5DLM and the comment calls that team Soapbox Technology LLC.

A company named Soapbox LLC, of Marietta, Georgia, appears in SEC filings under different people. The Armada copyright notice and the SOAPBOX trademark are Soapbox Technology, LLC, of Watertown, South Dakota.

Alex Gleason

Truth Social

This is the job, in the plainest sources. Reuters, 17 July 2023: Trump Media & Technology Group hired Gleason in January 2022 as head of engineering for the company that operates Donald Trump's Truth Social, and used Soapbox as the front end users see. He told Reuters he was resigning that day to work on Soapbox full time. Truth Social existed because Facebook and Twitter had cut Trump off after the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol. Gleason took the engineering seat on the replacement.

He said the same thing, at more length, on Citadel Dispatch, 13 June 2025. A man emailed him asking for help putting Soapbox on top of Mastodon and would not say who he was. Gleason:

And then before I knew it, I was on Donald Trump's social media team building the new website for Donald Trump after he was banned off of Twitter.

He said he led the web interface, that "the web interface on Truth Social now is based on Soapbox," and that "it doesn't say Soapbox anywhere in the UI." He called the result "the Donald Trump version of Mastodon." The secrecy was part of the job: "We weren't allowed to tell people, like, only our closest family members knew."

His own release note for Soapbox 3.0, dated 25 December 2022, draws the line from Gab to Spinster to Trump. The direct URL returns the site shell. This is the excerpt indexed on the Soapbox blog:

What started out as a fork of Gab's 2019 UI has now become a mainstay on the Fediverse. Originally created for the feminist platform Spinster, Soapbox now powers Truth Social, which has quickly become the largest website running Mastodon online.

Gab's interface, then Spinster, then Truth Social, then Armada. Same author. Same company. Armada's homepage says the communities need no host and no company sits in the middle.

The media kit still called him CEO and co-founder when this page was written, and it still lists Truth Social, 2022 to 2023. On 1 January 2026 he changed the title in the soapbox.pub source. The commit message is "I am BDFL, not CEO." The same day he posted:

Guys, I am announcing that I am stepping down as CEO of Soapbox. And becoming BDFL of Soapbox. There is actually no change. I just don't like the title "CEO".

Nostr note, 1 January 2026, and the matching LinkedIn post. BDFL means benevolent dictator for life. The media kit still said CEO when this page was written.

The same day as the Reuters resignation, his Soapbox post announced an OpenSats grant to build Ditto and said centralized social media is not sustainable. He had just spent a year and a half as the engineer of a president's centralized social network. Concord chat still encrypts on the device. The résumé does not.

On Hacker News, 28 September 2026, a comment called Armada horribly vibe-coded and said most people will end up on the default relays. Gleason's reply:

Look at the underlying Concord Protocol: https://concordprotocol.org/ There is definitely engineering. This part by hand.

The protocol is the part he defended as handmade. The client repository ships an AGENTS.md whose first line is guidance for agents working on the Armada client. Soapbox's other product, Shakespeare, is an AI app builder. Their transparency report for February to April 2026 says they rebuilt Ditto with it. That report does not say the shipped Armada client was generated.

On 1 October 2026, three days after the Hacker News thread, he posted:

I prompted Opus 5.5 "port Armada to SolidJS" and it took about 6 hours but it actually fucking did it. It looks perfect, 1:1, functionality is all perfect. I can't even tell the difference at all. The bundle size is only like 14% smaller and the performance boost isn't proven yet, so I'm not going to pull the trigger yet.

Nostr note, 1 October 2026, 01:35 UTC. The armada.buzz build checked on 7 October is still the React client. He described a port and left it unshipped.

He calls himself a transphobe

On 5 August 2022, after Pleroma's GitLab banned him, he published "Pleroma is dead." He had written "Fuck you. All of you are total assholes" on a merge request, and he says he stands by it. He also names the politics he thinks got him frozen out of that project for two years:

This is, of course, because I'm a transphobe. Because I don't believe faceless anime avatars online should have political influence over women's restrooms and sports.

In that post he says he was running Spinster.xyz, about 20,000 users, on Soapbox. The label is his. The 2019 essay is the long version. On 7 October 2026 a post on r/DiscordAlternatives, "regarding armada (tw: politics)," pointed at it. The copy below is from the Internet Archive capture that post links, of blog.alexgleason.me/trans/, "Why I don't support transgender ideology," online by April 2019.

Transgender ideology is a dogmatic cult that has brainwashed leftists into condoning violence against women.

Sex is a biological reality. Sex can't be changed, nor can race or species.

Transgender ideology is fiction. ... I'm unashamedly opposed to transgender ideology, and this is my public statement.

Read that as written. He says transgender identity is a cult and a fiction. He says sex cannot be changed, and he puts race and species in the same sentence, so that identifying as a woman is, in his argument, the same kind of claim as identifying as another race or another species. He defines a trans woman as "a male who identifies as a woman." He compares the idea to Rachel Dolezal. He argues there is no epidemic of violence against trans people. The section he titles "Arguments against trans ideology" opens its preface with a list of crimes by trans-identified defendants. The lines above are aimed at the claim that a trans woman is a woman. The essay links M. K. Fain's "Why I (Still) Defend Women's Sex-Based Rights."

A second post of his, "Mastodon deplatformed me, but they don't want me using Gab either," says Todon.nl permanently deleted his account on 19 April 2019 because an admin found that essay. He writes: "The ban was not based on my activity on Todon.nl." The instance deleted the account and everything he had posted there. In that post he also writes that he has "no issue with trans-identifying people" and that the target of the essay is an ideology.

The same post is where race comes up, in his own words. He describes Gab as a Mastodon server with no moderation beyond illegal content, and he argues the rest of the network should stop blocking it:

It is true that there are indeed "literal Nazis" on it. This isn't a hyperbole, as there are some users who quite literally advocate for the extermination of races of people. The reason is because Gab censors no one. It's not because Gab likes those people or wants them there.

Those are Nazis by his description: people who want races exterminated, on a server he says does not remove them. He knew. He writes, "Apparently a mass-shooter used the website," and the link on that sentence is coverage of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. His answer is still that the fediverse should stop blocking the server. The sentence he uses is "Blocking Gab promotes extremism, because extremism is born out of alienation." He also writes, "I'm a gender non-conforming Persian man, meaning their talking points of 'white heritage' and 'atomic family' are opposed to me. I don't support virtually any of the politics people on Gab advocate for, but at least they let me speak," and "No matter how many times you say it, I'm still not a Nazi." Take him at that. The demand in the same post is that a server which keeps those people should stay on the network. He later forked Gab's 2019 interface for Spinster, and that interface became the Truth Social front end. Todon.nl had already deleted him for the trans essay. His complaint was that Mastodon would not host him and would not let Gab host the rest.

What the thread got wrong

The Reddit post calls the Mastodon work an unethical reuse of Mastodon's source code. His own release note calls Soapbox a fork of that UI, later used as the Truth Social front end. The Armada client is AGPL-3.0. This page has no license ruling that the fork was a violation.

The post also says most of the Nostr community is of the same mind, and points at fiatjaf, who designed the Nostr protocol and does not build Armada. His domain does host site.olavo.fiatjaf.com, a homepage of writings by Olavo de Carvalho. The post calls Carvalho a far-right conspiracy theorist. That site is the part that checks out. "Most of the Nostr community" is the post's generalization, and this page does not adopt it.

A reply on the thread says the lead developer is Chad and that a community can avoid Gleason entirely. The media kit names Gleason and Fain. Chad Curtis appears on client commits and on the voice-broker repository. A self-hosted community can choose other relays. The defaults in the official build are still Soapbox's.

M. K. Fain

The media kit lists her as chief strategy officer and co-founder, and as the former communications director of the Women's Liberation Front. She writes the Armada launch essay, the comparison chart, and the Discord migration guide. The "no company," "no kill switch," and "every community is end-to-end encrypted" lines are hers. Her site, marykatefain.com, says she founded Spinster.xyz and works on "online spaces for women," and it points at Henhouse.social as a women-only Nostr relay. Her X bio says the tweets are set to auto-delete.

On 19 December 2019 she published "Fired For Feminism" on 4W, the publication she started. She prints the termination letter from Promptworks, the Philadelphia agency where she was a software engineer. The letter says that on 23 July 2019 an executive learned of her 14 July Medium article, "Non-binary is the new 'not like other girls,' and it's deeply rooted in misogyny," and fired her for cause under the social media policy. She describes the article as an argument that non-binary identity is internalized misogyny. She writes that she knew the piece could get her fired. Afterward, she writes, she started Spinster, "a feminist social media platform," and 4W. Gleason's 2022 post is him running that server and calling himself a transphobe for the politics the server was built to carry.

The Henhouse announcement, 17 June 2024, is the useful one, because it is her theory of bans:

Henhouse is only open to women. This is primarily based on the honor system, user content history, and judgement of the mods. ... Users who are found to be violating our rules, including men, will have their henhouse.social identity revoked and will not be able to participate in the local timeline or post to the Henhouse relay.

Is this censorship? No! Nostr is an open protocol, and we have no ability to prevent anyone from saying whatever they want - nor would we want to. We do have the ability, though, to create a better environment for ourselves where we don't have to deal with harassment. ... And you can always take your keys to another client, anyway.

Joiners "will be reviewed based on their existing content." That is an application. Two years later the Armada comparison essay says a platform-wide ban is technically impossible and there is no headquarters to pressure. Her 2024 post is the accurate scope: the key survives, the relay she runs does not have to carry you, and the name on that relay can be taken back. Armada's marketing keeps the first clause and spends the essay on it.

Spinster, in Gleason's 2023 post about Threads, is a server he administers, "arguably the largest independent feminist community online." The media-kit timeline dates the launch to August 2019. Fain's Armada essays leave Spinster and Henhouse out. Her own site still lists both.

The bridge habit

Armada's Discord bridge holds an admin role so it can mirror rooms, and the wizard says the mirror is plaintext. Gleason's July 2026 update for Mostr, a different product, says that bridge can decrypt bridged one-to-one chats "because the bridge controls the derived keys of bridged Fediverse users, the same mechanism it already uses to sign events on their behalf." The operator is the same group. On both bridges, the software in the middle can read the bridged copy.

Other names on the commits

Derek Ross, developer relations on the media kit, wrote the self-host guide. It is the straightest page Soapbox has published about Armada, and it still ends by calling the result asterisk-free. Chad Curtis shows up on client commits and on the voice-broker repository the guide tells you to clone. The product is a team. The essays, the company, and the default servers are Gleason and Fain's.