Chatto is now Open Source

(hmans.dev)

464 points | by speckx 4 hours ago

41 comments

  • wxw 4 hours ago
    > 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.

    • OhSoHumble 2 hours ago
      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.
      • czottmann 1 hour ago
        It's a first-class PWA currently but no native desktop apps yet.
    • electriclove 2 hours ago
      Can it be installed on Cloudflare or Vercel or something else that is easy/cheap/free?
      • uproarchat 2 hours ago
        I run something similar with livekit, all on hetzner. its exceedingly affordable for a bunch of people at once to use it.
  • duttish 27 minutes ago
    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.

  • mertbio 4 hours ago
    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 1 hour ago
      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.
    • ori_b 1 hour ago
      Alright, I was vaguely interested for a little, but you convinced me to avoid it.
      • urbandw311er 58 minutes ago
        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?
        • ori_b 43 minutes ago
          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.

      • te_chris 1 hour ago
        Spoilsport
    • budsniffer952 3 hours ago
      [flagged]
      • Forgeties79 2 hours ago
        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?

      • nullbio 1 hour ago
        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 1 hour ago
          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.

      • Cyberdog 2 hours ago
        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 1 hour ago
          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 1 hour ago
            >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 1 hour ago
              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 37 minutes ago
                Bug fixes and security patches, for one.
              • well_ackshually 23 minutes ago
                "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.
        • yard2010 2 hours ago
          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 1 hour ago
          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.
      • bakugo 2 hours ago
        > 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 1 hour ago
          Yeah, the crap I vibe coded is buggy as hell too. It takes a lot of tokens and time to polish my agentic turds.
      • rootatixww3 2 hours ago
        don't forget "where are all these beautiful apps that supposedly everybody vibe codes now?"
        • nozzlegear 1 hour ago
          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.
  • frenchie4111 3 hours ago
    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 2 hours ago
    • sneak 1 hour ago
      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.
  • dormento 3 hours ago
    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! :)

    • brodock 1 hour ago
      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

    • rootatixww3 2 hours ago
      chudo missed opportunity
  • simonw 3 hours ago
    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 3 hours ago
      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 1 hour ago
        Prohibiting a user of your software from modifying it and using it to run their business goes against both freedoms 0 and 1.

        This “users are obligated ‘give back’ the moment they make money with the gift they were given” is nonsense and anyone paying attention knows it. A business making money using free software doesn’t take anything away from the releasing organization.

        The anti-commerce bent of a subset of the free software zealots hate business so much that they tried to smuggle a EULA into the free software community. It’s nonsensical. Furthermore, the AGPL has never once been tested in court.

        • wsng 15 minutes ago
          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?

        • overfeed 55 minutes ago
          > 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.

        • sfink 6 minutes ago
          > 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.

        • ineptech 1 hour ago
          > 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 54 minutes ago
            Running a SaaS does not “fork users away”. You can’t fork a SaaS because services are not software and software are not services.
        • zetanor 1 hour ago
          Nobody is prohibiting you from using modified AGPL software to run your business.
          • sneak 55 minutes ago
            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 48 minutes ago
              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.

    • ricardobeat 3 hours ago
      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 1 hour ago
        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.
  • ferfumarma 55 minutes ago
    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?

  • robertlagrant 1 hour ago
    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.
  • johntash 3 hours ago
    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 2 hours ago
      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 1 hour ago
        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.
  • fernando-ram 1 hour ago
    I think this is the first sveltte project ive seen, very cool https://app.principal-ade.com/chattocorp/chatto
  • raaron773 58 minutes ago
    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

  • theK 2 hours ago
    So encrypted at rest but no E2EE, did I read that right?
    • NikxDa 1 hour ago
      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 1 hour ago
        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.
  • aitchnyu 1 hour ago
    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?
  • theturtletalks 4 hours ago
    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 4 hours ago
      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 3 hours ago
        What makes it nicer to use than Slack?
    • DANmode 4 hours ago
      > 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.

  • jacobgold 1 hour ago
    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 9 minutes ago
      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.

    • nine_k 1 hour ago
      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.

      • crote 1 hour ago
        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.

      • jacobgold 1 hour ago
        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.

    • unethical_ban 12 minutes ago
      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?

    • PaulRobinson 1 hour ago
      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 58 minutes ago
        > 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.

    • malwrar 1 hour ago
      > 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.

    • 0xbadcafebee 1 hour ago
      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.

    • IshKebab 57 minutes ago
      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.
    • JoeBOFH 1 hour ago
      XMPP exists…
  • Catloafdev 2 hours ago
    Looks great - is there any info on what server resources are actually required per feature or user count?
  • psarna 1 hour ago
    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
  • acomagu 3 hours ago
    Would English speakers pronounce this as "Chat-to"? To a Japanese person, this clearly sounds like "Cha-tto," which simply means "chat."
    • bigfishrunning 3 hours ago
      as an english speaker, i would pronounce it "chat-oh", but i'm open to correction
    • Gualdrapo 3 hours ago
      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
    • bluechair 1 hour ago
      Linguist here. It would likely be pronounced with a flap/tap, i.e., it would rhyme with shadow
    • johntash 3 hours ago
      I don't know what the "official" pronunciation is, but I would say "Chat-o" is probably right.
  • namegulf 2 hours ago
    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”'.

  • uwemaurer 2 hours ago
    Looks great! How does it compare to Zulip? we self host zulip and are quite happy with it
  • crote 1 hour ago
    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.

    [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/DiscordAlternatives/

  • mikkelam 2 hours ago
    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.

  • drBonkers 2 hours ago
    Needs drop in voice rooms a la Discord or Slack's Huddle
  • urbandw311er 55 minutes ago
    How does this compare to [SOME COMPETING THING I WANT TO PROMOTE]?
  • HeadOfProbing 38 minutes ago
    Seems neat
  • skybrian 3 hours ago
    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.)

  • Imustaskforhelp 3 hours ago
    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.

  • Mongoose 1 hour ago
    Not knowing what Chatto is, the headline is giving "zendaya is meechee"
  • npodbielski 4 hours ago
    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 3 hours ago
      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 3 hours ago
        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.
    • uxjw 2 hours ago
      Yeah its unfortunate there's an AI app on the apple store with the same name
  • toomuchtodo 4 hours ago
    Very cool! You should request being added to https://european-alternatives.eu/
  • tempfile 3 hours ago
    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!)
  • vsviridov 4 hours ago
    Amazing. And with SSO out of the box without weird "Oh, SSO is Enterprise only" BS.
  • latexr 3 hours ago
    > 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 3 hours ago
      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 3 hours ago
      Yeah a lot of them like Mattermost become surprisingly limited unless you pay. It's very annoying.
      • claytongulick 3 hours ago
        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 3 hours ago
    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.
  • gverrilla 1 hour ago
    > "The fastest way to give it a try is through Homebrew"

    for the 12 people that own a macbook, perhaps.

    • snazz 1 hour ago
      Homebrew also runs on Linux, it’s a common way to install minor command line utilities on a immutable/atomic distro
  • sreekanth850 2 hours ago
    looks super cool.
  • hackernows_test 2 hours ago
    I’m
  • ryss20 1 hour ago
    [flagged]
  • dofm 3 hours ago
    > 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 3 hours ago
      most complains i see about the others are performance-related, not looks-related. and chatto is trying to be performant.
      • dofm 3 hours ago
        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.

  • icase 3 hours ago
    soooooo campfire then
    • dewey 3 hours ago
      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.
    • vsviridov 1 hour ago
      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.
    • jkman 2 hours ago
      Off the bat, it seems that campfire doesn't support voice/video calls. So no, not at all
  • azinman2 1 hour ago
    > 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 40 minutes ago
      Is e2e encryption supported?
      • azinman2 33 minutes ago
        I thought the point of chat control was to give the eu a back door even in e2e?