Subcord

A Discord-like chat viewer for Substack publications. Browse, search, and reply to Substack community threads in a clean, familiar interface.

What is Subcord?

Substack has a chat feature built into each publication, but no dedicated UI for browsing conversations across all the publications you follow. Subcord fixes that — it pulls your subscribed chats into one place with a sidebar, threaded view, search, and reply support.

How it works

Subcord proxies Substack's private API through Next.js server-side API routes. Your session cookie is forwarded from the server to Substack on every request — it never touches the browser after you paste it in.

Your cookie is:

• Stored in an httpOnly server-side cookie (invisible to JavaScript)
• Never logged, saved to a database, or shared with anyone
• Only used to make requests to substack.com on your behalf

Privacy & security

This app is fully open source. You can read every line of code that handles your session cookie:

• src/lib/auth/session.ts — how the cookie is stored
• src/lib/api/substackClient.ts — how it is forwarded to Substack
• src/app/api/auth/ — login and logout routes

The deployed version is built directly from this repository's main branch with no modifications.

Local setup

git clone https://github.com/b04zdotcom/subcord.git
cd subcord
npm install
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000, paste your substack.sid cookie, and you're in.

To get your substack.sid cookie:

1. Sign in to substack.com in your browser
2. Open DevTools (F12 / Cmd+Option+I)
3. Go to Application → Cookies → https://substack.com
4. Copy the value of the substack.sid cookie

No environment variables are required. The app is stateless.

Deployment

The live deployment is connected to the main branch of this GitHub repository. Every push to main triggers an automatic redeploy on Netlify. No secrets or environment variables are configured — the app needs none.

To deploy your own instance:

1. Fork this repo
2. Connect it to a new Netlify site
3. Set the build command to npm run build and publish directory to .next

Stack

• Next.js 14 (App Router)
• TypeScript
• Tailwind CSS
• Fuse.js for client-side fuzzy search
• lucide-react for icons