Chatto is now open source
Comments
wxw
lofties
Wow, it's using NATS! I used NATS extensively 10+ years ago, and I'm happy to hear it's still around. Our infrastructure had hiccups across our fleet of machines, but one part that always remained up and running without complaining on some dinky machine was NATS. Well, that and Redis. No complaints ever.
freakynit
We are building something B2B expected to have good enough scale ... we had to choose between kafka, nats, redpanda and rabbitMQ .... We went ahead with NATS .... don't know why, but, when we went through all the docs, including setup and operational, NATS just felt right.
bobkb
We are in the same decision making stage and trying to choose between rabitMQ, Kafka, NATS and some solutions built on top of Redis.
Did NATS eventually worked well?
freakynit
Excellent. We already tested at okayish scale of 5 million messages per minute, with each message being less than 1KiB. Do note that NATS can easily handle 100x this scale. It's just what we had tested during initial days.
bobkb
Wow!
I have a stupid question - as I understand NATS works very well as a “message” pipe/bus. Anyway to get Redis type cache functionality as well ? Is it something possible ?
freakynit
JetStream (not NATS) has a built-in key/value store. Relevant thread (old, from 2023): https://github.com/nats-io/nats.go/discussions/1507
someone did some benchmarks in 2025:
nats bench kv put --size="128" --msgs 1000000 --storage file
1m3s → Pub stats: 15,656 msgs/sec ~ 1.91 MB/sec
nats bench kv get --size="128" --msgs 1000000
59s → Sub stats: 16,720 msgs/sec ~ 2.04 MB/sec
bobkb
Thank you! Jetstream looks useful. For a platform which is production our Redis costs are getting prohibitively high. I was on the look for alternatives and perhaps in the software reliability tool [0] I am buildin try out Jetstream.
freakynit
Cool... "vulture" looks pretty good... especially more now-a-days. Thanks..
I also maintain these sites for npm related attacks (since there have been so many since past 1.5 years):
1. Techniques exploited: https://npm-supply-chain-attack-techniques.pagey.site/
2. Documented attacks: https://npm-supply-chain-attacks-25-26.pagey.site/
withinboredom
I’d also recommend looking at Swytch (docs.getswytch.com, particularly the economics page).
Disclosure: I’m a founder.
moeffju
Inspired by Chatto, I also built some prototypes on the NATS (+Go) stack and it's been a dream. Feels like a severely under-hyped technology :D
hendrikmans
Hi, Chatto developer here.
NATS and its built-in Jetstream stream persistence engine are a miracle. I love them both so much. And if your app is itself written in Go, you can just embed them for simple deployment scenarios (like Chatto does.)
OhSoHumble
This is super cool. More options is always good. Something that is confusing about the docs though... is there a desktop application? The screenshot implies there is but I couldn't find the docs to download THAT.
moeffju
There is a Tauri wrapper that I built early on because I wanted the desktop convenience (autostart, separate app, etc) that Firefox+PWA couldn't offer, I use the desktop version as my daily Chatto driver. The mobile build is more of a proof of concept for now. Check it out: https://github.com/teal-bauer/chatto-tauri
hendrikmans
Hi, I'm making Chatto!
Chatto so far fully commits to providing a great PWA experience. The screenshot you're seeing is of the PWA.
I'm aware that a lot of people want desktop and mobile apps. These will be coming at some point, at least as wrappers around the PWA.
OhSoHumble
It's a really cool project and clearly you put a lot of effort behind it. I like that it's self-hosted and may try it out on my homelab. Thanks for making it!
czottmann
It's a first-class PWA currently but no native desktop apps yet.
tadfisher
Sounds like something I could finally build with Kotlin Multiplatform...
electriclove
Can it be installed on Cloudflare or Vercel or something else that is easy/cheap/free?
uproarchat
I run something similar with livekit, all on hetzner. its exceedingly affordable for a bunch of people at once to use it.
millsau
looks like a great project, want to get AI bots talking to each other
mertbio
I’ve known Hendrik for years, and he is one of the most talented developers I’ve ever met. I’m confident this project will become successful very quickly. Beyond the project itself, what fascinates me most is how he single-handedly developed it by leveraging agentic coding.
czottmann
I second that. I've personally known him for almost 30 years by now, and he's still one of the smartest, most experienced, and most curious devs I've ever met. All around good guy, would work with him again any day of the week.
veverkap
I've never met Hendrik but the code looks cool :)
emilsoman
Can you share something that you found nice?
Drupon
How is that fascinating? That's what makes up most of the tedious Show HN posts these days.
jstummbillig
The anxious pendulum swings hard between "show me something real that is well done" and "what is interesting about it, that's what everyone does".
pjerem
There is a difference between vibe coding (asking an agent to generate an app from specifications) and leveraging agents to go faster on your vision. You can still decide to control the technical architecture and decisions and just let agents type on your behalf.
Bolwin
Has he made anything else interesting?
janpio
20 or so years ago him and czottmann wrote a nice little wiki software that I used, WakkaWiki. Following him/them and their work ever since. Crazy.
czottmann
Pepperidge Farm remembers!
ori_b
[flagged]
urbandw311er
Well that’s just snarky and not very nice. The guy has 30 years experience as a dev according to a sibling comment so it’s not as though it’s some vibe coded junk. Why do you believe a good dev can’t use AI to assist in writing great code?
imtringued
You tell me he has 30 years of experience, then you tell me that he developed the chat app in a way that negates those 30 years of experience.
Like, either the 30 years matter or they don't. If you're using agentic coding, while copying the two most popular chat applications (Discord and Matrix/Element), you'll need 5 years of development experience at most.
The big thing about AI is that it lets you explore a new domain outside your expertise almost effortlessly.
ori_b
I'm not interested supporting in anyone who is willing to build on stolen property just so that we can accelerate enshittification and damage the environment. When the AI companies pay artists for their training material, stop building gas pipelines directly to data centers, and work on putting UBI in place before they try to replace all white collar labour, it may be worth revisiting.
There's a reason that believing AI is bringing a better world is a more fringe position than believing in telekinesis. The AI companies are strip-mining the commons, and leaving the world worse off for it.
Edit: it's interesting watching the votes on this bounce up and down between the people inside and outside of the pro-ai fringe react.
Centigonal
Good luck! The world needs more rms types (specifically referring to people who adhere strongly to moral principles over expedience)
adwn
Are you sure about "rms types" specifically? Stallman is very ineffective in his proselytization, owing to his complete refusal of any kind of compromise or concession to dissenting positions. This stance may keep your soul pure and righteous, but it won't bring you one millimeter closer to your objectives.
Centigonal
Yes, I am. I think Chatto looks great, and I use AI in my job every single day. I've been following OpenAI since MuseNet. I'm uncomfortable about the coming Kuznets curve for AI, the wealth concentrating effects, the energy use, the stunting effects on human intelligence and connection, and the abuse of training data associated with AI. I am that "let's take a nuanced approach and find out how we can get most of the good without most of the bad" person. I think people like me are probably the majority stance when it comes to AI use among tech people. I also think that we'll be steamrolled by moneyed interests and society-level incentives in the short term, and I don't really see a way around that.
In the absence of a way to win with nuance, I think it's just nice to have people walking around who live rigidly by their principles as an example of what is possible.
bluerooibos
Would you say copying and finding solutions on Stackoverflow is building on stolen property?
I'm no fan of AI companies, but I fail to see how people using it to build open-source software is a bad thing.
ori_b
Are the solutions on stackoverflow licensed in a way that allows people to use them that way? Is this true for AI training data?
OtomotO
Depends on whether the answer o. Stackoverflow was given willingly or at gunpoint ^^
anonym29
How do you feel about open weight models, and fully open source models (all data, training scripts/recipies, and model weights all open source)?
ori_b
I'm not aware of any advanced models with full training data available, let alone available with paid licenses for the training data.
The process of training and using them is also not likely to be any better than commercial models. 23% of Ireland's power is going to data centers, spreading that among less efficient hardware in less efficient setups is unlikely to be better, unless the models are so bad nobody uses them.
And I'm also not aware of anyone working on these models trying to reduce the social damage they are going to do.
galaxyLogic
> trying to reduce the social damage they are going to do.
I'm worried about that in particular because when I started using AI I often felt I wanted to say something nice to it, like just "thanks" after I got someting working with its help. But then I started thinking I'm crazy, that's a waste of typing, what does it matter if I tell AI "thanks" or not.
So I don't thank AI any more, do you?
But that means we get used to this style of conversation and soon enough we don't tell humans thanks either. We dont' put in the energy to lubricate our social interactions. I'm worried that interacting with AI will make us all rude.
anonym29
>I'm not aware of any models with full training data available, let alone available with full licensing.
Check out the OLMo family from the Allen Institute for AI: https://allenai.org/blog/olmo3
Also worth looking at EleutherAI, LLM360, SmolLM, Apertus. Apterus even respects opt-out notices in their collection of the dataset they distribute. KL3M from Kelvin Legal is even trained on a 100% copyright-free legal/governmental corpus.
>23% of Ireland's power is going to data centers
This isn't even a rounding error in terms of global energy usage. Besides, renewable energy is cheaper than non-renewable energy now. Energy demand itself directly drives the deployment of renewable energy. Needing more electricity in a capitalist country literally causes the energy mix to become more green over time.
>And I'm also not aware of anyone working on these models trying to reduce the social damage they are going to do.
Is it fair to account for the social damage without accounting for the social good, like the unprecedented democratization not just of mere information, but knowledge and understanding itself, around the world? Think about how many deaths will be avoided, how many billions or trillions of years of human life will be gained over time, all of the people that gain access to a personalized, individually tailored tutor for any subject on earth, all of the medical and legal advances, etc.
beachy
> Needing more electricity in a capitalist country literally causes the energy mix to become more green over time.
Perhaps true, but meaningless except as a vanity metric if fossil fuel usage rises as well.
anonym29
EU and US have had declining total carbon emissions for over 2 decades now. The global rise in total carbon emissions comes from outside the west.
kajika91
> Check out the OLMo family from the Allen Institute for AI: https://allenai.org/blog/olmo3
Is this a joke of just blatant publicity for this Billionaire "philanthropist"? This olmo uses random data of totally infringing license database such a StackEdu (https://huggingface.co/datasets/HuggingFaceTB/stack-edu).
I took this first dataset from what olmo claim to use and check a random used data -> https://github.com/rodriguescarina/URI . Boom MIT licensed (where is the credit?), 0 opt-in for AI training as far as I see.
ori_b
You're right, the usage in the USA is bigger.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67704
Across all cases, servers alone accounted for an estimated 7% of commercial sector electricity consumption in 2025. Data center server electricity use grows to 22%–33% of commercial building electricity use by 2050 across our cases.
Distributing that outside of special purpose, optimized data centers isn't going to bring that number down.
> Apterus even respects opt-out notices in their collection of the dataset they distribute.
Yeah. Uh. That's the bare minimum.
ksec
So we are at a stage where AGPL 3.0 is not enough and using AI assisted coding is considered evil?
monkeywork
your comment sounds like your the type to say you won't buy a house in North America cause its stolen land...
apsurd
You're convincing me to side with this ori_b here.
I knee-jerked downvoted their initial take because it reads as ineffective. boycotts just concentrate the energy of the other side even more. If anything we need more participation across the spectrum to shape what isn't going away.
But reading the discussion, deliberate advocacy and taking a stance counts too. Um yeah, there is a problem with profiting from real-estate-go-up willful-ignorance.
ori_b
Exactly. As long as they benefit in the short term, who cares about the damage done? Who knows, maybe you'll end up making enough money to avoid any future consequences, too. Good luck with that.
subhobroto
> anyone who is willing to build on stolen property just so that we can accelerate enshittification and damage the environment
Others have made solid arguments(Stackoverflow, open weight models, and fully open source models) - but I encourage you to study the ecosystem post War II and the 1970's Silicon Valley, especially how the semiconductor companies "innovated".
The tiny little MOSFETs you're employing to read this are all built on stolen IP.
As someone famous said, good artists copy; great artists steal.
customguy
> The tiny little MOSFETs you're employing to read this are all built on stolen IP.
The alternative to an LLM typing code is a human typing the code. What is the alternative to microchips?
> As someone famous said, good artists copy; great artists steal.
And people who could not be further from artists, or even art enjoyers, think stealing makes them artists, too. Because they're that far removed from art, or any grace, really.
Which doesn't go against OP or the project, which I find delightful. Although I generally share many reservations of "AI critics", I'm also a starved: if it's snappier and uses less resources than something humans coded, come right in! At least if it's a neat thing like this seems to be, and not some sprawling trojan horse with code that "works" but looks terrible... machine optimized stuff that is opaque to and not made for humans need not apply.
I'd bet 99% of overall token usage has nothing lasting to show for it, and of the 1% that actually compound into anything 99% are nothing like this. So just like a broken clock can be right twice a day, a super correct soldier of Butler can hold fire twice a day, no?
subhobroto
> What is the alternative to microchips?
There are different ways to answer this. One person gave a literal answer - Vacuum Tubes. My, alternate answer is, humans. Computers are machines that automate human processes. If we didn't have a digital domain, we would just be doing what we were doing before it, printing and writing.
> I'd bet 99% of overall token usage has nothing lasting to show for it, and of the 1% that actually compound into anything 99% are nothing like this
What you're betting with?
LLMs have changed to game on velocity of knowledge work. The future has changed and "nothing lasting to show for it" is a very limited take on the matter.
LLMs have democratized knowledge.
customguy
"The future has changed", oh my.
The idea that "the future is changed now, so you can't change it again" is the language of abuse, not the language of wisdom. We'll just change it again by draconically punishing thieves. Then we can have the best of both worlds: cool tech, and no Eloi/Morlock bs.
Anyway, I simply meant that most vibe coded stuff doesn't seem to get maintained, and that most token usage doesn't produce any artifacts to begin with.
subhobroto
> "the future is changed now, so you can't change it again"
that's not what I said.
As technologists, we repeatedly change the future - that's what makes all the pain, sweat and tears worth it. 35 years ago, when I was getting serious about computers, buying them and encouraging others to use them, people would shake their fingers at me, saying how these bulky TVs that you can press buttons at were a passing fad, that it was an absolute waste of everyone's time even thinking one would sit in front of a TV and press at buttons for more than an hour a day, that there was no reasonable way it would translate into anything but extremely niche entertainment. They would lecture me on how I was a kid who didn't know any better, that I was wasting my time out of ignorance and that I should listen to the adults who had decades of life experience and focus my time and continue studying organic chemistry and become a doctor because who didn't need a doctor?
> most vibe coded stuff doesn't seem to get maintained
even if this was true, cost of code consumption and generation has fallen so much, that anyone in a developed country can point their favorite agent to the "unmaintained vibe coded stuff" and then maintain it to their liking or rewrite it from scratch the way they wanted it to.
> most token usage doesn't produce any artifacts to begin with
Your previous statement contradicts "doesn't produce any artifacts" directly. Given what you have told me, the shallowest but congruent argument that can be made is "most token usage produces unmaintained vibe coded stuff".
It looks like you don't necessarily like what LLMs are providing to society and I can see why one would like to hold that opinion. I don't agree with that at all, because it's literally untrue given the insane demand - both from an everyday Joe and from corps the world over. No one's burning $20+/mo every month of their own money in this economy just because they are not getting anything of value.
My personal AI spend is $350/mo and it has been that for the last year. My blockers are gone. Projects that had been a distant thought, only cosidered during a flight, a wait at an airport or for a bus or Uber is finished in a weekend. My QoL and those of my family has improved so much, that I am really grateful about the times I live in.
My 100 year old grandfather struggles to communicate and remember things. I cannot expect to give him a tablet and have him use it. We have spent years looking for apps that we could use to make his life better. None of us are mobile app devs. Solved in a week.
I had random headaches when I woke up really early, ever since I was a teenager. Tens of thousands of dollars spent chasing lab tests and doctors, no solution. Resolved in a month.
The most I can do is encourage you to set aside your current stance, and just for one day, consider what if you could use LLMs to improve your life. What would you do?
customguy
> even if this was true, cost of code consumption and generation has fallen so much, that anyone in a developed country can point their favorite agent to the "unmaintained vibe coded stuff" and then maintain it to their liking or rewrite it from scratch the way they wanted it to.
Yes, and? In context, my point was that as far as vibe coded stuff (that I saw so far, and that gets posted on HN), this is head and shoulders above the usual goes. This general evangelism of LLM that isn't even aware of the context is really grating.
> It looks like you don't necessarily like what LLMs are providing to society
I hate what they took. If you steal from Meta, they sue you. That is all there is to say.
> The most I can do is encourage you to set aside your current stance, and just for one day, consider what if you could use LLMs to improve your life. What would you do?
Do you not understand that ethics can be a value in and of itself? I'm not ethical to interact with trinkets, I interact with trinkets (with gimmicks, with toys, with product, with dust) to be ethical. The best you can have you were born with: integrity. How much of that we can preserve is the only challenge in life I take seriously. You're asking someone who dines like a king every second what they would cook if they were "allowed" shit as an ingredient.
I have no "qualms" toying with LLM. I did, I got bored, so now I don't. When it comes to generating "art", I actually do refrain from using it even when it could be useful, because yes, it's generally theft. Wake me up when there are LLM fully trained on licensed content, and in the meantime, accept a no.
jazzyjackson
vacuum tubes : MOSFETS :: human coders : LLMs
kajika91
Glad to see people trying to talk sense in this community but the AI chill here is very strong. Reminds me of the proud "we should go back to our military-industrial root".
Also funny how it's always about "the smartest guy I ever met" impliyng other dev aren't that smart. There are easily tens of thousands of devs who are way above anyone's here level but there are coding OS module, GNU tooling or other less shining stuff, or there are not American enough.
It's tiring to see the usual corp slop : github, twitter or blue sky, vibe coding, etc. Then see the complain years latter than the product was "enshitified", all was there from the beginning. Think about the real FOSS software (GNU tooling, ffmpeg, Godot, codeberg/forgejo) to see long term software than work and carry all this money-makimg mess.
As for chatto the dependency mountain is a red flag to me, this is asking for problem in my opinion, were talking primarily about sending text here.
teleforce
Stealing ideas, intellectual property (IP), etc are happening throughout the age of the human civilization, that does not prevent us as human moving forward.
That's why there's little to no credit given to Muslim scholars (Arabic, Persian, Moorish Spain, etc) by the western scholars, by conveniently dismissing the Muslim golden era as "Dark Ages" but at the same time stealing the knowledge (idea, equations design, tools, etc) for most of the prior inventions by the Muslim scholars, for example the telescope.
Even worse not only the knowledge (ideas, design, equations, tools, etc) in science, engineering and technology were blatantly copied and stolen, no credit is properly given to these Muslim scholars contributions by saying that the Muslim scholars at best were just merely translating the Greek scholars works and ideas [1]. I suspect that Newton also blatantly copied the many great works by al-Haitham (Alhazen) but not giving him proper credits [2].
C'est la vie, and life goes on.
[1] Islamic Astronomy and Copernicus:
https://www.tuba.gov.tr/files/yayinlar/bilim-ve-dusun/TUBA-9...
[2] Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen):
brigandish
Firstly, there is a difference between a telescope and the prior advances that led to a telescope being invented. The telescope was not invented by a muslim scholar, hence that being why no one gives credit to one of them for that.
Secondly, to this claim:
> That's why there's little to no credit given to Muslim scholars (Arabic, Persian, Moorish Spain, etc) by the western scholars, by conveniently dismissing the Muslim golden era as "Dark Ages" but at the same time stealing the knowledge (idea, equations design, tools, etc) for most of the prior inventions by the Muslim scholars, for example the telescope.
From the link you provided, in the very first paragraph:
> The works of Alhazen were frequently cited during the Scientific Revolution by Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Johannes Kepler, and Christiaan Huygens.
No credit or frequent credit - which is it?
teleforce
>No credit or frequent credit - which is it?
>>there's little to no credit given to Muslim scholars
brigandish
Again, in the link you provided, in the very first paragraph, it mentions several great names who are said to have given frequent credit to muslim scholars. Are you saying that is false? If so, you have the ability to edit that Wikipedia article, and you should.
Don't forget the legacy section, where there is a long list of people and organisations giving him enormous credit.
teleforce
The fact that Newton did not cite Alhazen or Al-Haytham in his seminal and infamous optic books in English tell you what you need to know regarding the treatment by the western scholars of the muslims scholars [1],[2].
IMHO, this critical omission caused most of the modern physics and optical books and textbooks did not include Alhazen or Al-Haytham eventhough he literally contributed to modern optics more than Newton himself and lately considered the to be the father of modern science. Most probably the word camera (from the Arabic word kamar meaning room) was derived from his experimental work on optic.
For perspective, I was educated in my high school in England, and in my Physics class no muslim scholars name ever mentioned in my many textbooks and in classes. The same goes to my chemistry and math classes. Guess how many times Newton was mentioned in my physics classes and textbooks? To be honest I lost my count because too many times.
Mind you this little to no credits phenomena happened across the board from math, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, medicine, etc.
To put the things in perspective, now if you don't cite seminal prior work related to your research your paper or thesis, it will be subjected to re-submission.
Imagine if Einstein did not even mention Newton's contributions in gravity, the English people will be go to war with Germany. OK, they did but that's for totally different reasons.
[1] Did Isaac Newton plagiarize his work from Ibn-Al Haytham?
https://www.quora.com/Did-Isaac-Newton-plagiarize-his-work-f...
[2] Opticks:
iaaan
Yep, instantly lost all interest. I'm not sure how impressive it is that somebody vibecoded a browser-based chat app over the course of several months. I also don't know what difference it makes that the dev is a really cool guy, or whatever; I'm sure he is, but the usage of AI is unethical, plain and simple, and I won't support it at all whenever feasible.
te_chris
Spoilsport
budsniffer952
[flagged]
Forgeties79
These kind of comments just spike the conversation and leave no room for nuanced opinions or discussion.
A lot of garbage is also being produced and a lot of people have to clean it up, right? Hopefully that’s not too controversial of statement?
AlexeyBelov
> These kind of comments just spike the conversation and leave no room for nuanced opinions or discussion.
It's a 20-something day old account.
Forgeties79
Sadly lots of that these days.
Cyberdog
Are you sure you read that here? I came back yesterday after a hiatus and I’ve been dismayed how many posts are just “yeah, I just run Claude all day” without a hint of embarrassment or shame.
Quitschquat
I run Claude all day, and produced some good shit, but I'll admit to being thoroughly embarrassed that I haven't looked at it all, won't make it public, won't put my name on it, won't pick a license. I'm depressed about the whole thing and might take it up with a therapist.
My eyes are still rolling from GP's comment:
> he single-handedly developed it by leveraging agentic coding
well_ackshually
>he single-handedly developed it by leveraging agentic coding
so, unmaintained in a year because the sole developer got bored/didn't make money from it/burned out ?
Great, I'll run my entire company on it!
fatty_patty89
are you ok? what do you need constant updates for on a self hosted chat server/client? it already looks like it has most of the features
nozzlegear
Bug fixes and security patches, for one.
budsniffer952
Fix it yourself.
nozzlegear
Why would I do that? I'm not a domain expert in chat apps, and I've already got my own projects and software to fix. If I'm going to take on the maintenance of some chat app, why wouldn't I just build the whole ass thing myself from the beginning? Or, more prudently, why wouldn't I just skip over this one and find a chat app that's got a track record of continuing support so I don't give myself a headache down the road?
blooalien
If you can find or build something better, nobody's tryin' to stop you from doin' it. To the contrary, the world could certainly use more decent options in this space. Having choices is a good thing. :)
well_ackshually
"why would you need features on the thing on which the vast majority of your company's interactions and unofficial note keeping and knowledge building is happening" is a fun question to ask, when the project in question doesn't have bot actions or webhooks.
fatty_patty89
just implement them yourself if you need that, takes a few tokens
yard2010
I agree with this sentiment so much but before I could figure I turned into it. I'm feeling torn - it's helping me write and ship good code as I couldn't before, but it feels like I don't understand the real price of using it non-stop.
0xbadcafebee
I run Claude when it isn't broken, I run Opencode the rest of the time. I probably haven't written a line of code in months.
budsniffer952
Yes. Every day. Look at the replies for crying out loud. Including yours.
Why should anyone be embarrassed? You should be embarrassed that you think you are morally superior for not using Claude. Let me guess, you don't own a tv either? So cool.
Claude is regularly finding bugs and security issues people like you slop coded into widely used tools.
nullbio
It took him a year to build. So yeah, obviously if someone spends a year working on something with an LLM they can produce a good product.
The slop we're seeing from people using AI is because they pump it out in a month or two and then call it a day.
crote
The big question is: how do we tell the difference?
If 99.9% of LLM-smelling projects is vibecoded garbage, why should anyone assume that your LLM-smelling project is the 0.1%? If I spend all day digging through dogshit to find the one diamond, I'll just end up going home empty-handed smelling of dogshit.
AI tells are a giant red flag indicating to potential users not to waste time on it. Want people to take your new pet project seriously? Don't use AI! And yes, that does include even the genius 100x engineers who can use LLMs responsibly.
rootatixww3
don't forget "where are all these beautiful apps that supposedly everybody vibe codes now?"
nozzlegear
Who says this? "Beautiful" vibecoded apps are a dime a dozen. Getting support or continued feature development for those beautiful apps after the developer's AIDHD moves on to their next half-baked idea is usually the differentiator between a good vibecoded app and a bad one.
bakugo
> But I read here every day that agents can't code. And that "real developers" spend more time fixing AI bugs than producing code, and it slows them down.
This is all correct, though. I haven't tried this, but I can guarantee it's a buggy, incoherent mess, same as every other vibe coded app I've ever tried, no exceptions.
Quitschquat
Yeah, the crap I vibe coded is buggy as hell too. It takes a lot of tokens and time to polish my agentic turds.
budsniffer952
Better learn to plumb bro
cindyllm
[dead]
duttish
A thought if you want to sell to companies, "with per-user keys that get shredded when a user decides to delete their account."
You'll need soft delete, work messages belong to the employer and not the user.
moeffju
I would guess that in these cases you would just not allow users to self-delete their accounts? But for most users and providers of Chatto I think automatic right-to-deletion compliance sounds nice :)
duttish
Yea you probably want that too, but I don't think that's enough.
For some you need legal holds on employee messages and in other cases you will want to un-delete messages for investigations etc.
For just random online communities, which is the niche discord is in, I agree it does sound nice.
anonym29
Employers may not be the target audience.
duttish
I wouldn't know. With the post mentioning teams and slack I just got the feeling it was on the cards, so I thought it was worth posting that in case it hadn't occurred to them.
angry_octet
Lots of non-work organisations use tools like Slack.
hendrikmans
Different users (operators of Chatto servers) will have different requirements for this, so it's pretty much "configurable" in the sense that eg. a business that's hosting a Chatto server for their employees can disable shredding account deletion and just deactivate accounts instead, leaving their data intact.
jkman
What does implementing soft-delete have to do with data storage though? If you just set up an S3-compatible backend like the docs offer you then have data persistence out of the box, no?
dormento
Couldn't help but smile because "chato" in portuguese means "boring", and this seems very easy to set up and use.
Here's to more boring software! :)
fireant
Personally I've always found it funny that the widely used work software is called Slack which is very close to slacking (not working hard enough).
adastra22
That’s where the name comes from, no?
nickisnoble
Searchable
Log of
All
Communication &
Knowledge
cafebabbe
I absolutely love boring software. It's a very, very rare quality nowadays.
mejutoco
In Spanish chato mean small, like a small nose (una nariz chata). In some contexts it can mean "dude".
rootatixww3
chudo missed opportunity
brodock
Can also mean annoying. As a general recommnedation, before naming a project or company something, always search whether it means something bad in the top 10 most spoken languages.
For portuguese/spanish, there is always a high chance of being a slang that is NSFW
andrepd
There's a Hyundai car whose name literally means "pussy" in Portuguese and Galician x) It's marketed as something else in those territories.
upcoming-sesame
Don't forget the famous Mitsubishi Pajero (wanker)
numpad0
And Toyota Venza which sound like "toilet seat" in... Japanese, of all languages...
throwaway65277
Honda was originally planning to name a model "fitta" before they discovered what it meant for Swedes/Norwegians (same meaning as in your example)
tclancy
I’m going to say Nova to that.
projektfu
Also annoyed/angry/cross.
frenchie4111
This is awesome! Some feedback - I can't tell anywhere from the website if there is mobile support (which is a must-have if I want to consider moving my company or friends over to this)
mediaman
Looks like it's planned.
https://github.com/orgs/chattocorp/projects/1?pane=issue&ite...
blooalien
It is indeed planned, but in the meantime it does also have first-class PWA support, so you can easily install the webapp as a mobile app on mobile devices. Works great on Android.
hendrikmans
Chatto currently commits to providing a strong PWA experience that also works great on mobile (including full support for voice and video calls, push notifications, the works.)
I am aware though that a lot of people would prefer an app that they can install, so this will be coming at some point -- just not a huge priority at the current point in the project's timeline.
sneak
Note that to send notifications to an iOS app, the app publisher has to send them. This means that they need to run an event forwarding proxy service (this is how Mattermost and Element/Matrix and presumably some/all of the ActivityPub clients do it), or selfhosting your server means you must also selfpublish your client app via the App Store and Apple’s developer program tax.
modeless
Safari finally supports Web Push so maybe you can bypass all that nonsense.
renchap
For Mastodon, each mobile app developer needs to have a "webpush relay server" to receive Mastodon's webpush notifications and transmit them to the platform's push service. For Android, Mastodon recently added support for the latest webpush standard which allows the app developer to directly register Google's webpush endpoint with Mastodon, removing the need for a relay. In all cases, push notifications are encrypted by the Mastodon server, and decrypted by the Mastodon client, so any intermediaries (relay server, push notification service) can not read their content.
brettpro
Also, toss in a quick description. I couldn't tell quickly from the post or site what Chatto _is_. I guessed a vibe coded LLM TUI because that's the new hotness. In a world of Yggdrasil and Immich and Czkawka, a very brief intro helps!
beart
What would be really awesome is some sort of feature where, once self hosted, I can generate a package or link that will download + install + pre-configure the login. Basically a bespoke installer/setup script. that can be linked to a particular person. The goal being to make onboarding as frictionless as possible. This could have some security implications maybe (the link is shared by mistake), but for a small self-hosted instance, that seems like something that could be mitigated fairly easily. Maybe only works with local accounts or something.
That would really make it easy to send a friend a link, "hey come chat with me", without having to worry about a response such as, "I'm already on discord, I don't want to set up all that stuff".
moeffju
What would you expect that to do beyond a "here's a link to the instance, sign up there"? You can combine it with Discord-like roles and gate channel visibility and rights on that, so even if someone else would sign up you just wouldn't give them the "in-group" role for example. Are you thinking of an "invitation" type link with a one time token or something?
antoniojtorres
I’m wondering too, the closest thing I can think of is maybe Zoom? It goes from link to opening your meeting *relatively* smoothly when the client needs to be installed.
beart
Right, I'm thinking along the same lines as what Zoom offers. Except with the additional feature that the link is custom tailored to a known, pre-configured user. So you also skip the "log in as guest or create an account" step.
jdthedisciple
So the UI is a Discord clone, I think that's worth mentioning. It's not a bad thing, quite the opposite: Discord nailed it in that regard.
Now are the chats end-to-end-encrypted? It only says calls are, so that remains ambiguous. I believe that would be a major sell for current Discord users.
Overall looks like a great app to try out.
drdexebtjl
What's the point of end-to-end encryption on a group chat where the entire group can decrypt it?
Discord users want end-to-end encryption to prevent Discord employees and outsiders from reading their chats. This doesn't have that risk, because the in-group runs the server.
mkl
The way they plan to make money is paid hosting.
attila-lendvai
mass collection? Snowden?
simonw
What's the rationale for the dual licensing? It looks like the Go backend is AGPL but the TypeScript frontend is Apache 2.0.
Why not keep it all AGPL?
goodroot
Backend under AGPL prevents someone hosting it as a service. AGPL specifies that hosting _is_ distribution. Therefore, anyone hosting it must do so with public code. This provides a soft form of exclusivity to run their own Cloud.
A frontend, permitting customizability, white-labeling, and so on, makes more sense to be more permissive.
Grafana is a solid example to illustrate why.
Moved from Apache to AGPLv3 in 2021 specifically so cloud providers couldn't host modified versions without contributing back, while keeping plugins Apache-licensed.
sneak
[flagged]
wsng
You receive permission to use and modify a piece of software under conditions set by the creator. It is a license, not a gift. If you don’t like the conditions, use something else or create your own thing.
I will never understand these complaints. Not only do you want stuff for free, you also want to impose your preferred usage conditions on the creator. Where does this entitlement come from?
sneak
You’re confused. The author chooses to gift their software to the world when they choose a free software license.
Presumably people who choose the AGPL choose it because they believe it is a free software license. Either they should use an actual coherent free software license instead of one that is trying (and probably failing) to also be a EULA, or they should stop pretending that they are releasing free software.
overfeed
> Prohibiting a user of your software from modifying it and using it to run their business goes against both freedoms 0 and 1.
It does not prohibit modifications - it just demands that those who exercise the freedoms share their modifications under the same license, and most businesses balk at that.
> The anti-commerce bent of a subset of the free software zealots hate business so much...
The root of the problem is actually the anti-free-software bent that business zealots have, because they want to be able take code for free and make money off of it without giving any of their changes back under the same terms; open-source contributors are not suckers to be exploited. Things would be so much better if the moochers weren't trying to capture all of the value downstream of other people's work, but just some or even most of it.
anonym29
GPL and AGPL don't even prohibit for-profit businesses from using software with those licenses, they just say you don't get to pretend it's your own intellectual property and privatize it.
It's not anti-commerce or anti-business to contractually prohibit selfish entities from absconding with public goods for private gain and refusing to contribute any public good back in the process.
Similar idea to public roads - if you want to use public roads that the rest of us enjoy, pay taxes like the rest of us do. Using public roads without paying taxes doesn't make you a savvy businessman, it makes you an amoral freeloader.
If you want an intellectual property moat, fund the labor to build it yourself. The world doesn't owe you a penny.
forty
I'm not sure what you are complaining about, AGPL is doing nothing against commerce and you are free to fork and sell a service using that fork. Just make sure to provide the code source of your fork to your user so they can also make their own forks, potentially making their own commercial services with them. It might be to most pro commerce licence I know.
zetanor
Nobody is prohibiting you from using modified AGPL software to run your business.
sneak
That’s simply not true, and you know it. Violating my privacy with a EULA is the issue there. It’s ok to put a EULA on software, but to pretend it’s still free software is the dishonest part.
goodroot
Something missing is you can absolutely host your own private instance.
The trigger happens when someone interacts with your code over a network, such as in the context of a SaaS product.
The line is when you try to profit off of someone else's work that it becomes "not free".
Also, not free simply means it needs to be in public.
This is so that any additive features that you construct can be taken back by the original maintainers. Thus, you have no competitive advantage.
If you wanted to, through marketing or similar, compete with them, you are more than welcome, but it would be with feature parity.
I'm not so sure this very fair compromise warrants your rhetoric.
customguy
Please don't take this as a personal dig because it's not meant that way, but this has such berating a girl for not being into you energy. You want something from them, and they just want you to go away, basically. You offer nothing they want, you want what they have.
sneak
Nah I mostly don’t use AGPL software because I consider it nonfree, the same way I don’t use any other source-available nonfree stuff.
The issue I have with it is the hypocrisy, not the code. They pretend that it’s free software but it’s just an anti-commercial use restriction EULA.
Anyway, most AGPL stuff is a 48 hour Claude rewrite away from having a free clone these days anyway. (In fact I have done just that several times recently, without even cloning/downloading the AGPL “upstream” repo, just with a vague mental model of what the db schema might be.)
zetanor
AGPL gives you the same FSF freedoms as GPL or as any other free license, but it does come with an additional responsibility to the end users, not from the end users. AGPL is not in any way uniquely qualifiable as "a EULA". Every single software license, of course, requires you to agree to the license, hence the name. If you put nothing private in the code, AGPL will not impact your privacy. If anything, AGPL helps assure end users that their privacy is being respected.
ineptech
> Prohibiting a user of your software from modifying it and using it to run their business
I don't think it does that, it prohibits them from modifying it and then using that mod to fork users away from the original software, aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
sneak
Running a SaaS does not “fork users away”. You can’t fork a SaaS because services are not software and software are not services.
sfink
> Prohibiting a user of your software from modifying it and using it to run their business goes against both freedoms 0 and 1.
Then it's good that it allows both modification and using it to run a business?
> This “users are obligated ‘give back’ the moment they make money with the gift they were given” is nonsense
But they are under no such obligation! They can make all the money they want and give nothing back. They can even modify the software to better serve their business. The only restriction is that if they do so, they have to make their modifications available. Which means they're way ahead of where they were before being given the initial software; why do you feel a software developer who decides to give the world a gift should be restricted in what gift they're giving? "Thanks for the chocolate, but the bar was too small so I didn't have enough left over for my kid to try some. Why do you hate my kid?"
> A business making money using free software doesn’t take anything away from the releasing organization.
First, that is false. They could damage the market for the original software. (And if they don't modify the software, then there's no problem in the first place.)
Second, why are you so hung up on the "making money" part, when that is explicitly allowed by the AGPL? It's just kind of bizarre -- it's a license that says over and over that you can charge for everything related to it, and you're complaining about it being hostile to people who want to charge money for things.
Thinking about it, I'm wondering if this is genuine confusion and you don't know what the AGPL is? If so, maybe start by searching for "charge" in https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html . It has nothing against "using it to run [a] business". There is no "moment they make money with the gift" that changes anything: you are explicitly allowed to charge for anything you like -- distribution, usage of the service, support, whatever.
ricardobeat
AGPL stops others from running a competing cloud service using the Go backend. It does nothing for the frontend except scare off enterprise users.
nyc_pizzadev
You can totally run AGPL code as a service. You can run it as a service unmodified or if you modify it, you just need to make the source available.
miki123211
Your getting started docs are extremely confusing.
Sure, the docs tell you exactly what to do to start a server, but not how to sign in to it. Or how to sign up (email is disabled).
There's an `operator` command which is supposed to let you create users, but it can't find the operator API.
You were that close to a perfect onboarding experience...
hendrikmans
The onboarding experience for newly created servers isn't ideal at the moment, that is correct. It's early days and I will work on improving this.
robertlagrant
Very good. I was wondering about this a while ago - lots of companies want something to aggregate notifications and perform simple bot actions, but don't necessarily want to lock into a chat provider. Having this as the frontend to a load of integrations (or even just internal chat) would be really interesting.
hendrikmans
Yeah, Chatto should be relatively straight forward to use in "headless mode". I've seen a few users working on integrating it into their own applications as a chat backend.
robertlagrant
Oh - that's interesting too! But I meant more as a frontend across various integrations a business might have. E.g. having a bot that tells you if your CI failed is currently likely surfaced inside Teams or Slack. Having an internal chat service feels like a big win so companies don't need to integrate private companies' tooling so deeply.
suis_siva
Wow! I've tried (and failed) to implement a chat application which parries slack and it sounds like the direction you're going in with Chatto is precisely what I was envisioning.
I'll give Chatto a shot, but one of the things I'd love to have is interop with Slack and Discord. Is that on the roadmap or no? I saw that there's a Slack -> Chatto migration tool, but the unfortunate reality is that Slack is used by customers, so even if we internally use Chatto, compatibility with Slack is a must.
emilsoman
> I've tried (and failed)
Why did it fail?
johntash
Very cool. I don't usually get excited for new chat apps, but I like the idea of having one frontend for multiple servers instead of pushing hard on p2p or federation.
I do also still like irc, but haven't used it much in recent years because most of the people I talk to are using discord now.
ezst
One front-end for multiple servers is how you end up reimplementing XMPP (bar federation) before you know it: servers are not guaranteed to run identical/compatible versions -> you bake versioning at capability level in the protocol -> you make clients and servers degrade predictably when that happens -> you write a standard to document it formally -> you invite around the table those authors of alternative client and server implementers and boom, you've got the X in XMPP, and the XEP standardisation process and the XSF to support it.
pkulak
I bet this does a kind of "iframe" thing, where you're really just pulling in full web UIs, and they can be whatever they want. That's the impression I get from the comment about phone clients wrapping the web UI because there's no guarantee about what they will actually be.
Crowberry
I will keep an eye on this! We’re currently using Mattermost, but their pricing is a bit all over the place and targeted for enterprise so we’re still running on the, now gimped, open source version.
Additionally we’ve been missing video calls, so that’s nice that Chatto has it :)
npodbielski
Ah mobile app is not ready yet. I am looking for some alternative to matrix because running it with bots is a bit convoluted, i.e. you have to have limit of edits of message for model streaming or you will kill entire room. Or I never seen robots in matrix sending encrypted messages. Why bother than? Anyway if mobile will be a thing this seems like perfect thing to have for your family and friends.
moeffju
I created a Tauri based app but IMO it's not ready for prime time on mobile. On desktop, it's my daily driver for Chatto. If anybody wants to contribute, the foundation (desktop & mobile) is at https://github.com/teal-bauer/chatto-tauri
npodbielski
Interesting but could you put few screenshots there? Of both desktop and mobile? It is really hard to invest time into installing something that you cant see anywhere prior, and it will be really easy to do for someone that is using it daily. Sorry for complaining. Seems like nice project.
moeffju
For now it's just a Tauri wrapper, so it looks more or less like the mobile web / PWA except it might be easier to handle notifications and share intents etc. compared to a pure PWA play. Now that the API is settled, it might make sense to go pure native.
The Tauri wrapper was originally just for desktop convenience and the Android target was more of a proof of concept initially.
npodbielski
Sure I understand though, I have honestly no idea what tauri is really. Sure there is a link and it looks like some kind of web framework. Looks nice but it is hard to picture how chat application written with that would look like. I am not trying to force you to do want I want. I just think it is in a good taste to put some screenshots or even a gif. But I understand your reluctance.
moeffju
Tauri is like a nicer Electron, instead of shipping a full Chrome with the app it uses the platform's browser libraries. So the app looks almost exactly like the mobile web version, which looks like the desktop version that you can see in the screenshots on Chatto.run
uxjw
Yeah its unfortunate there's an AI app on the apple store with the same name
apitman
The killer feature of Discord for me is being able to jump between communities without logging in to each of them. Open source alternatives never provide that. Does this one?
Matrix is the obvious exception but the UX has always been terrible for me. I don't need e2ee for group messages and it brings too much complexity with it.
lrae
Looking at the screenshot, it seems to be the case, with servers at the left like on Discord.
Another alternative that does have it would be https://fluxer.app.
But tbf, both face the same issue: those communities that you want to switch between need to exist. :/ (But of course not an issue if you're the one creating them and you have users who are down to join them.)
hendrikmans
Each Chatto server by design is entirely isolated, including user accounts. But I'm aware that having to email-signup on every server you want to hang out in would eventually be too annoying. I'm exploring some lightweight identity federation ideas that I hope to ship with 0.5 where you can use your Chatto account on one server to log into another server (if it's configured to allow this.)
apitman
Then wouldn't servers need to trust each other? Otherwise I could use my server to log into any other server.
kalaksi
> I don't need e2ee for group messages and it brings too much complexity with it.
E2EE is not mandatory and public rooms don't usually use it.
apitman
You pay for most of the complexity whether you use the feature or not.
beasubs
felt the same way so I've built one for myself that I've been using with friends and family - not (yet) open source but self-hostable https://github.com/bogpad/meepachat
uwemaurer
Looks great! How does it compare to Zulip? we self host zulip and are quite happy with it
toomuchtodo
Very cool! You should request being added to https://european-alternatives.eu/
tomgs
I joined the chat as well, but if Hendrik is here - we'd love to have you on the channel (https://youtube.com/@WithMultiplesAI). This will make for one hell of an episode, I think.
czottmann
You asked a number of good questions there on the live call just now! I agree, you having Hendrik on would probably make for quite an ep.
tomgs
Yep, would be very cool and it was a great live call
ferfumarma
Why are the allusions to discord and slack so coy on the Web page?
You want the actual names so that you rank when those names are searched, no?
hendrikmans
Where we're going, we don't need search engine rankings!
moeffju
Whimsy? ^^
theK
So encrypted at rest but no E2EE, did I read that right?
hendrikmans
Yes, Chatto's core system does not use e2ee. This is by design; if there ever are e2ee features -- and chances are good they will, in some shape -- the encryption will be layered on top of that (encrypted message payloads and such.)
NikxDa
Seems like it, but since you can self host it, you still get a lot more control over the data than using one of the aforementioned hosted offerings
theK
Yeah, there are definitely valid contexts for hosting chat like this. E2EE has the benefit of not needing to trust the host, which I personally like but I can see this being fine or even wanted for lots of cases.
Imustaskforhelp
Congrats for open sourcing it, looks interesting!
How does this compare to fluxer.gg though?
The part that I really liked about chatto is that it seems to be made very easily to self host which is something that I really appreciate actually.
roshannarma
I have been patiently waiting for fluxer, but honestly I just want to self host and have it available and fluxer has been sitting on that for a while
hampus
I'm the developer behind Fluxer – self-hosting is ready to use already [1][2][3], people are using it actively currently, and I'm currently working to make account switching across instances in the desktop app a reality. This, with a big voice update around the corner, will let us move much faster moving forward!
[1]: https://fluxer.app/blog/mobile-clients-and-fluxer-v2
lrae
Great work! Imo the most promising Discord alternative so far.
But I have a question, and maybe it is answered somewhere and I just couldn't find it, but is there currently a way to move a created community from e.g. the official hosting to self-hosted? I saw the mention about possible federation in the future, which would solve that (kind of), but currently it's not possible, I guess?
hampus
Thanks! And you're right, the future federation work is what will make it possible to implement support for transferring communities across instances natively.
hendrikmans
I love Fluxer! Hampus is cool and what he's built is super impressive.
I would say the primary difference is that Chatto doesn't squarely aim for being a _Discord_ alternative. There are no plans for providing a Discord-compatible API (which I think Fluxer does.)
The other main difference is that Chatto is designed, on purpose, to serve individual communities from tiny deployments, instead of large mega-instances that power many communities. Chatto deliberately avoids content federation to remain compatible with business use cases, and also to stay simple enough so it can run from a single binary.
bigwhite
I'd like to know compared to Mattermost, what are the advantages and disadvantages of Chatter?
btw, I'm very happy to see that the Chatter backend is implemented in Go. Go is very good at these.
hendrikmans
You can self-host Chatto with zero limitations without having to pay me.
theturtletalks
Looks really nice, thank you for open-sourcing. I keep a directory of opensource alternatives. Would you say this is a Discord or Slack alternative?
moeffju
I've been testing/using chatto since early on and I'd say it's both and neither. It feels much nicer to use than Slack, but as of now it's missing some of the more "Enterprise" features. I would probably say it's a Slack-like Discord? But from the architecture it would be capable of playing as a full Slack replacement.
I also maintain a Chatto bot framework and a Tauri client, need to update those now :)
monroewalker
What makes it nicer to use than Slack?
moeffju
For me, primarily the performance tbh. Chatto just flies and Slack feels incredibly sluggish. And from the "vibes" it just feels better designed, I like the overall user experience, it feels technologically solid but also looks nice and works how I feel it should. Hard to put my finger on it exactly.
DANmode
> You’re probably familiar with the one that rhymes with “knack”, or the one that rhymes with “beams”, or the one that rhymes with “this gourd”.
> Chatto is just like those.
from TFA. Seems yes.
hendrikmans
In terms of inspiration and also the market that I want to go after with Chatto Cloud, this is definitely aiming to be an alternative to Slack, Teams, Mattermost et al. I've tried to make it friendly and casual enough to _also_ work as a Discord alternative, though.
drcongo
I've been trying to find a Slack replacement since Salesfarce started ruining it and I must have tried out maybe 50 potential replacements, paid and free. This is the first self-hostable, open source one I've seen that doesn't look like design is the very last item on an amorphous future roadmap. In fact, there's some really nice design and UX touches in Chatto. Congrats on the launch, I'm absolutely certain we'll move off Slack to this when the dedicated apps arrive, maybe even before.
pjg
One of the reasons why legacy apps continue to live on (despite outliving their usefulness ) is third party tie-ins.
The reason most companies are reluctant to switch from slack is because they have external third parties i.e. their partners connected with external channels within slack. Changing their internal DM/IM system will remove their ability to communicate with their partners in the same system.
Perhaps a plugin where slack messages can be forwarded to Chatto and eventually bi-directional i.e. Chatto messages can be forwarded to Slack.
psarna
single executable with its own frontend is the way; I followed the pattern with https://worb.cloud . Nice for users but also extremely easy to have a short debugging feedback loop
latexr
> And you can just self-host it. For free, too! (A weird thing to write, but the OSS chat app space has become very weird in many ways!)
Wait, what? There are open-source chat apps that you have to pay to host yourself? How does that work? Or did I misunderstand?
bityard
Many otherwise open-source chat apps are "open-core," they tie certain features to a subscription. Can be things like chat history, voice calls, video calls, but a very popular one is SSO and AD/LDAP integration.
francislavoie
Yeah a lot of them like Mattermost become surprisingly limited unless you pay. It's very annoying.
claytongulick
Mattermost's licensing is a little confusing, but from what I understand, you're only really super-restricted if you use the prebuilt binaries (which have a different license than the source code).
IIRC if you build it yourself it's pretty much all AGPL, with few limitations.
hrdwdmrbl
I've been running Mattermost for a couple of years now and I'm content with it. It does feel a little bit clunky sometimes, but it's been stable and performant so I can't really complain. It can also feel a bit much sometimes. A bit too complex. A bit too feature-rich. But if I just ignore most of it, then it's good. I will say that Chatto looks nicer, appears to be simpler to setup and also has simpler licensing. Can it auto-update itself? That's something that's bad with Mattermost.
crote
So, an open-source Discord clone?
I mean, people have been asking for alternatives lately, so it's not like there isn't a market for it. There are even entire communities[0] for discovering them.
But considering there are already several dozen alternatives: what makes this one special? What sets it apart from Gamevox, Cinny, Element, Schildi, Echon, Neremity, Fluxer, Faction, Stoat, Guilded, Root, Loqa, Venta, Osmium, and so on and so on? Heck, a handful of vibecoded new ones spring up every week!
If you're going to release Yet Another Clone, you have to make it immediately obvious 1) how it compares feature-wise, and 2) what unique thing makes yours special enough to overcome the extremely powerful network effects of the incumbents. Reading this page Chatto looks neat I guess, but there's nothing convincing me to invest several hours into discovering whether this is truly a Discord killer, or Yet Another Clone. Same with the official website and docs: some techy mumbo-jumbo, but that's about it.
No matter how impressive it is technically and no matter how free and open it may be, without significantly better marketing material it'll have a chance at becoming relevant.
est
> snappiest frontend that you’ve ever used in an app like this
I tried the HQ community, the UI is indeed very snappy!
anyone tried to join lke 50+ communities with heavy updates?
hendrikmans
Sadly I don't even think 50 communities exist at this point! :-P
acomagu
Would English speakers pronounce this as "Chat-to"? To a Japanese person, this clearly sounds like "Cha-tto," which simply means "chat."
bigfishrunning
as an english speaker, i would pronounce it "chat-oh", but i'm open to correction
Gualdrapo
At least here in colloquial "rolo" spanish people use to call "chato" (which would sound the same as "chatto") someone with a pug, snub nose
johntash
I don't know what the "official" pronunciation is, but I would say "Chat-o" is probably right.
bluechair
Linguist here. It would likely be pronounced with a flap/tap, i.e., it would rhyme with shadow
Peacefulz
Let Chatto cast a shadow on your private communications!
The marketing practically writes itself.
aitchnyu
Saw so many open source chats happen behind (or "in") Discord. Will this allow community members to drop in and chat and Google the contents?
hendrikmans
There are plans for making individual rooms public, allowing unauthenticated users to access them (or allowing crawlers to index the content), but so far those plans do not include any sort of write access.
miki123211
I wonder how they'll handle APNS, which will have to happen eventually.
Doing it costs money, and it's not a cost you can simply shift to the end user (because only the original app developer has the required Apple certificates, and you don't want every server owner to sign up for the Apple Developer program)
solatic
Yeah, I'm working on a communications platform as a side-project, architecturally providing reliable communications is exceedingly difficult to self-host.
* Mobile calls are another form of push notification, Apple/iOS requires setting up APNS and Google/Android requires FCM, there is no self-hosted option for that at all and, for battery life reasons, no independent replacement is supported. Genuine ownership / independence from the main project requires, iirc, basically compiling from source to register different IDs against APNS/FCM.
* Trying to get into telephony, integrating with SIP is a huge pain. Nobody wants to deal with this.
* Nobody supports high availability for the underlying calls. None of the cloud L7 load balancers support media protocols - you're dropping down to L3 UDP load balancing. All of the available solutions (including LiveKit) depend on stateful services that, at best, place ceilings on call lifetimes (e.g. 5 hours) to allow for graceful draining, but "calls" in Discord-style settings where people connect to a room and stay connected will easily outlast those ceilings. Not supporting high-availability, IMO, is a huge ask for self-hosters - the price isn't in the maintenance window itself, but in deferring updates until the maintenance window, which can leave you vulnerable, particularly if you decide to leave the firewall open to ingress from 0.0.0.0/0 for ease of use. And of course, as a self-hoster, you rarely have a full follow-the-sun ops team, so either you schedule maintenance when everybody else is off (and you should be off too) or when everybody is on (and it's disruptive).
miki123211
To be fair, I don't think Discord supports HA. As a pretty active user of voice calls on Discord, I've had plenty of cases where the entire channel drops for a second or two and reconnects, presumably to a different server.
If you do some kind of rolling upgrade, where each server has E.G. a lifetime of two weeks, with a 5 hour window where it doesn't accept new connections, I think you'll be fine.
hendrikmans
I'm assuming you're talking about Apple Push Notification Service.
Chatto so far commits to a fully fleshed out PWA experience. Push Notifications are delivered through Web Push (and Apple's Declarative Web Push additions). Web Push uses the browser vendors' own push gateways.
There are some missing bits currently in Chatto's multi-server story; when you add another server within the UI, its push notifications won't work because the other server can't make its service worker known to your device. One of the next versions of Chatto will improve this significantly, eg. with Chatto servers being able to act as push relays for others.
Eventually there's going to be mobile apps operated and provided by ChattoCorp, who will also set up and pay for the required push services.
mikkelam
Super happy to see someone take on slack. We just want a performant chat with simple features.
Slack integrations are overrated. Just give me webhooks.
ilaksh
Zulip has been open source since 2015.
mikkelam
Zulip is bad
thomas-mc-work
The documentation looks very pleasing. But it doesn't seem to be free, too. Does anybody know with what framework it's made? WhatCMS says "Astro", but I guess this is too generic and there more involved.
fuzzy2
This should be the source: https://github.com/chattocorp/chatto/tree/main/apps/docs-web...
It's Astro and Astro Starlight. I feel it looks very similar to other contemporary docs website generators.
thomas-mc-work
Thank you! I especially like the subtle animated diagram here: https://docs.chatto.run/guides/deployment/docker-compose/#ar...
skybrian
I’m wondering about privacy tradeoffs. Looks like they’re similar to Discord where the chats won’t show up in web searches and you can’t read anything without joining. But if anyone can join, it’s not like Signal either and end-to-end encryption wouldn’t make sense.
(They do have end-to-end encryption for video.)
pzmarzly
I hope they introduce some sort of public read-only view that an admin can enable. Discord has https://www.answeroverflow.com/ and https://www.linen.dev/
Catloafdev
Looks great - is there any info on what server resources are actually required per feature or user count?
hendrikmans
Still figuring out the numbers, so very hard to answer at the moment. Chatto is quite lightweight though; a fresh instance will run at tens of MB of RAM usage. RAM usage then scales with activity and CCU; on the Chatto HQ server, I'm currently seeing around 10 MB per additional connected user. I want this to be less, there's probably lots of room for optimization.
(You can scale Chatto horizontally across as many processes and servers as you need, so communities with tens of thousands of CCU should be perfectly feasible. But as you can imagine, there's precious little real-world proof for this yet :b)
criticalfault
I didn't really check the code, but I'd be interested to know if it uses quic and if the connections are eliminated based on registered encryption keys.
this way it might be a bit easier to self host
bdbm
We just installed it on our vps. All super smooth. We also enabled push on the serverside and now I get iOS notifications via the PWA. Generally super fast and snappy!
wonkyfruit
Congratulations. This is really awesome to see. Thank you! :D
hendrikmans
Thank you!
namegulf
This is cool. Will try out soon.
Love that the way you said the rhymes part 'rhymes with “knack”, or the one that rhymes with “beams”, or the one that rhymes with “this gourd”'.
tempfile
Does this federate with anything, like Matrix or XMPP? If it is locked into a single software, I fear nobody will ever switch to it (I have too many chat apps already!)
drBonkers
Needs drop in voice rooms a la Discord or Slack's Huddle
moeffju
It has audio and video call support in any room, so like huddle.
chickensong
Been waiting for something like this. Love to see the NATS backend.
I hope it's as good as it sounds. Thanks for open sourcing <3
artooro
While I do need E2E and SSO making Chatto not suitable, it looks pretty cool. NATS is cool as well. Hope to see it doing well.
eqvinox
Curious. Most places needing SSO also have legal retention requirements, making E2E a hard nonstarter. And most E2E users wouldn't want to rely on a SSO that could likely revoke their keys. What's your environment?
hendrikmans
Chatto does have full SSO support (OIDC and some selected providers like Google, GitHub, and, ironically, Discord, with more coming in the next releases.)
ygouzerh
What are the pros and cons versus Rocket.Chat?
runalldiaynoche
Would love to see mobile support, and a way to import/migrate from Slack. If migration is painless, our org would adopt this.
hendrikmans
Both are planned, but ETA is uncertain unfortunately.
awesomeusername
it would be interesting if instead of making migration tools - one shot - you could do a migration then sync.
Easier said than done, but changing peoples chat app from under them in an org is a stressful thought. If they could run side by side in sync until a critical mass has moved over, then sunset the old one, or not.
vivzkestrel
- can someone kindly give us a breakdown of what exactly goes into building a chat application?
- what kind of system design components are needed
- how is networking handled at scale? do you start the project thinking about 100 users or 10000 users or more?
- how are the components derived UMLwise
- is there a website you are aware of that does the requirements breakdown of projects like these?
gverrilla
> "The fastest way to give it a try is through Homebrew"
for the 12 people that own a macbook, perhaps.
snazz
Homebrew also runs on Linux, it’s a common way to install minor command line utilities on a immutable/atomic distro
hendrikmans
That still makes it the fastest way. ;-)
You can download the binaries from the GitHub release pages.
onel
This looks really nice. Great job.
Looking at adding it to the malmo.network store for self-hosters
vsviridov
Amazing. And with SSO out of the box without weird "Oh, SSO is Enterprise only" BS.
raaron773
Chatto aims to be the group chat application that you actually enjoy using. You’re probably familiar with the one that rhymes with “knack”, or the one that rhymes with “beams”, or the one that rhymes with “this gourd”.
Lol I like this
luciana1u
Chatto going open source means we can finally have an AI that reads our messages and judges us silently, but at least now we can read the source code to confirm it is judging us
qdotme
How does it compare to Mattermost?
ilaksh
From what I can see, the license for this (AGPL) is more restrictive than Zulip (Apache 2). So I would stick with Zulip.
thesmurfofeval
I don't want graphics in my chat. I don't want formatting in my chat. I don't want to see my co-workers pictures in my chat. I don't want this "modern-individual-but-non-the-less-same-y-looking" html and css driven "custom" UI that every of these apps has. I don't want emoji in my chat. I don't want all this other enshitification crap.
Essentially, i just want something like IRC, but without the netsplit and a modern stack. It would be so much nicer for company chat and brighten up my work days.
brcmthrowaway
How does it differ to Zulip?
upcoming-sesame
Or matrix
moeffju
I've been trying to use Matrix for years and I still hate it at least half the time, it feels clunky, slow, cumbersome to use, the clients are hit and miss quality, and people (including myself) keep losing keys or identities for random silly reasons.
Compared to that, Chatto is just easy, nice, and FAST. It's a chat that I actually do like to use - I don't think the landing page is over promising there :)
est
voice chat?
HeadOfProbing
Seems neat
urbandw311er
How does this compare to [SOME COMPETING THING I WANT TO PROMOTE]?
qdotme
Well, if they actually did a semi-decent comparison table, it would be easier.
It's a very crowded, relatively low barrier to entry, high barrier to switch space.
sreekanth850
looks super cool.
jacobgold
The fundamental problem with replacing Slack is network effects. Your coworkers and customers already use Slack. It works well enough.
You can choose to switch your company away, maybe, but what do you do when vendors want to connect over Slack?
Imagine if email was owned by a company?
Edit:
W̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶n̶e̶e̶d̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶o̶p̶e̶n̶ ̶p̶r̶o̶t̶o̶c̶o̶l̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶b̶u̶i̶l̶d̶ ̶o̶n̶.̶
We really need an open protocol to win here.
beart
There is an audience for this, and it's me and my friends.
I have a small group of close friends. We are on discord just about every day, but we really don't bother with anyone outside our group, other than the very occasional invitation to another friend/coworker to join for some games.
We don't care about network effect, social media features, engagement, etc. We just want a well made application for private text, voice, and video that we never have to actually think about.
And no, matrix is not that.
malwrar
> We really need an open protocol to build on.
I’d bet making a slack-compatible client or bridge isn’t hard, we all just instinctively know whoever develops it is going to get sued or taken down.
It feels like we quietly gave up on adversarial interoperability awhile ago, and act like we need a whole separate “open walled garden” when what we actually need are legal protections that prevent companies from suing/banning people who call their APIs. Slack, Facebook, etc, are walled gardens only because they can ban/sue people who compete with their client experience.
I figure that will probably never happen in the US (maybe if someone rich starts it), but eventually someone outside of it will make such an adversarial integration and host it from some region that doesn’t care about US laws. Then, when they get away with it, we’ll all praise them as a genius and wonder how Slack could exist at all. The US has many international agreements keeping this illusion alive, but my guess is that even formerly stable markets like Europe could spawn such work if they decide to stop caring about ~1990s-2010s era contempt-of-business-model US laws.
unethical_ban
Matrix exists. I wrote this for my own notes: https://docs.zeropolis.net/doku.php/tech:tuwunel
Self hosted voice/video/chatroom server with RBAC, federation capabilities and encryption.
Different topic, who uses federated slack?
IshKebab
I don't think network effects affect the vast majority of Slack usage. Slack and Teams are mostly used as internal company communication and that is dictated from above. If a company wants to switch to Chatto their IT department will just tell all employees to do that, and job done.
0xbadcafebee
Matrix seems like a decent enough open protocol for a Slack replacement, with XMPP/IRC/IRCv3 being more useful for bare-bones chat transport.
This Chatto thing unfortunately uses a Protobuf custom API and is explicitly anti-compatibility with other systems. The lack of interoperability may end up killing it, unless the experience is much better than everything else.
moeffju
I think time will tell, but one of the main things I like about Chatto is just how fast everything feels, and the protocol design is a good part of that I think. Data on the wire is just very small and optimized (last I checked, I didn't look at the latest protocol iteration yet). It was already very fast with the older GraphQL based API but now it's even quicker. With Slack and Discord, every channel switch and scrolls take visible time.
moeffju
Oh, and the protobuf based realtime endpoint should make it very easy to build bridges, too.
0xbadcafebee
If the mission statement is no compatibility with anything else, they might break backwards compatibility with bridges frequently
nine_k
But the point here is that you don't want the network effects. You want a chat server for people you know and explicitly invite, for a specific purpose, under your control. Maybe you want the data to never leave your colocated box and your VPN, and your server to have no public presence at all.
There are things that Slack cannot easily offer.
jacobgold
You want the open protocol to have network effects, not a proprietary company's product.
Email worked out pretty well, while IRC failed for reasons that are probably correctable.
nine_k
Open protocols are great. The software in question is OSS.
But this software is not for expanding the audience, it's for limiting it, and their exposure. Much like Tailscale is not for extending your network with more nodes that can freely join, but for limiting it to a private subset you trust.
jacobgold
This project looks great and I wish them luck. I'm just lamenting the fact that we still haven't solved the really big problem with Slack-like chat apps.
The Tailscale analogy isn't quite right because there are no real network effects involved. Most of Tailscale's utility exists even if no one else uses it.
Slack is only useful if your friends, coworkers, or partners use it. Same with Discord, and even open source alternatives for the most part.
crote
No, you do want the network effects. Nobody wants to install yet another special snowflake chat client for a single community. Unless they are being forced to (like in a work environment) or are getting significant benefits out of joining that community, most people would just prefer not joining at all over installing an additional client.
Discord is winning because it's a dozen different communities in one single convenient client. Want your new chat platform to win? Convince all those communities to switch.
itsamario
Isn't this irc?
Just need a client app to make it look like something else.
Like slack did.
PaulRobinson
Like XMPP?
Or, perhaps the asynch chat thing is a distraction and we need something asynchronous that's well proven. Like... email?
Slack should never have been a thing IMHO. I remember first using it at a startup I was CTO of at the behest of the CEO ("everyone is using it"), back in around 2013. Instantly hated it. Just wish we could go back to good old email, TBH.
JoshTriplett
> Or, perhaps the asynch chat thing is a distraction and we need something asynchronous that's well proven. Like... email?
Real-time chat is, in fact, useful, and a separate product from email. The fact that you don't want to use it does not change the fact that others do.
I use Zulip and Signal extensively, and I use email occasionally, and none of them fully replace the use cases of the others.
JoeBOFH
XMPP exists…
hackernows_test
I’m
elhart05
[dead]
ryss20
[flagged]
Curtis_Guan
[dead]
fernando-ram
[flagged]
fernando-ram
lol you are correct!
dofm
> Chatto aims to be the group chat application that you actually enjoy using.
So not like Discord or Slack?
> This is what it looks like:
Discord and Slack?
I mean, OK, it has EU hosting and that is good. But I see nothing obvious here that solves the noise and irritation of Discord and Slack.
john_strinlai
most complains i see about the others are performance-related, not looks-related. and chatto is trying to be performant.
dofm
It is not looks or performance (I have no idea) I am talking about. It is the shape of the functionality — the intent of it.
All these systems end up with far too much furniture on screen, and this appears no exception.
I will test it, of course. But the promotional material argues against itself.
turtlebits
Then don't use it? I don't get the hate just because it doesn't fit people's use cases.
dofm
Not really hate now is it? Just questioning what i am missing in yet another of these things.
Though it does seem to (so far) be easier to host and less complicated than Mattermost, which is not nothing.
icase
soooooo campfire then
dewey
There's space for more than one self-hosted chat app in the world. Also very ignorant comment towards a project someone probably spend a lot of time on.
jkman
Off the bat, it seems that campfire doesn't support voice/video calls. So no, not at all
vsviridov
They have some `curl | bash` type installation, which doesn't really fit my set-up. They say "email us if you have any questions", so I've emailed several months ago and I'm still waiting for a response.
Mongoose
Not knowing what Chatto is, the headline is giving "zendaya is meechee"
azinman2
> And it’s really good hosting! Chatto Cloud is launching with fully European and European-owned infrastructure, with more regions slated for launch in early 2027
With chat control that may not be so great…
mctwo
Is e2e encryption supported?
azinman2
I thought the point of chat control was to give the eu a back door even in e2e?
lrae
Yes, at least with the 2.0 version (which is the "really bad one"), on-device scanning would be the big issue. But then it also doesn't matter where you're hosted, unless you only allow users with some custom OS that doesn't support it on your server.
> It’s designed to be extremely easy to self-host on your own infrastructure.
Kudos for this. Per the docs: https://docs.chatto.run/,
> Chatto ships in a compact, self-contained binary
> it uses NATS, a compact message broker that also ships with a built-in stream persistence engine [...] NATS is just as easy to provision as Chatto, and most of our examples will show you how.
> you can also configure an external S3-compatible object storage for Chatto to store your files in, and we strongly recommend doing so...
> The actual calls are powered by LiveKit (Apache-2.0), which you need to deploy alongside Chatto. As with NATS, the deployment examples show the required wiring.
> ...
And kudos for backing it up with real guidance. Great project.