Chatto is now Open Source

> 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.

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.

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)

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! :)

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.

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”'.

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?

So encrypted at rest but no E2EE, did I read that right?

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.

Looks great! How does it compare to Zulip? we self host zulip and are quite happy with it

Needs drop in voice rooms a la Discord or Slack's Huddle

Looks great - is there any info on what server resources are actually required per feature or user count?

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?

Would English speakers pronounce this as "Chat-to"? To a Japanese person, this clearly sounds like "Cha-tto," which simply means "chat."

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.)

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.

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.

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!)

Very cool! You should request being added to https://european-alternatives.eu/

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.

looks super cool.

> 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?

Amazing. And with SSO out of the box without weird "Oh, SSO is Enterprise only" BS.

I’m

> 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.

soooooo campfire then