tho having to have a certificate does goes against FLOSS values. the goal isnt to make contributing elitist but that anyone can modify it. being scared of legal repercussions for code is like weird since the platform doesnt do illegal things and disallow misusage of the platform or code. any platform disallow to use their platform as a intermediary in a cyberattack. obviously.

atm its kinda better than stoat since development doesnt take much time, unlike stoat, which are horribly slow to fix bugs and implement features, harmony have constant fixes and updates, also being open to any contributors unlike stoat which requires to apply to be able to contribute which is suspicious for a supposed open source software.

also (kinda unrelated) harmony have better moderation than stoat which had pretty messed up things happens in the mod team plus them still enforcing OSA since they are in the uk.

keep in mind federation isnt ready atm on harmony.

heres the codeberg : https://codeberg.org/MelodyChat/Harmony

its not 1 to 1 to discord but it was made to be compatible with discord. mostly to ease the process of migrating bots and automation, and being able to use discord client to connect to harmony. atm you can self host harmony but theres isnt a functional federation yet as it hasnt be coded yet.

its not spacebar but its related, fermi was once a spacebar client. but due to spacebar management and weird lies from them around AI (they were dismissive about AI usage). harmony was made (spacebar fork) with the goals of actually fixing the bugs and glitches and instances problems spacebar still have to this day. in short, spacebar refused to improve so harmony was made