9 ms·

Chatto is now open source

1106 points by speckx 4mo ago

theturtletalks 4mo 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?
- DANmode 4mo 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.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- moeffju 4mo 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 4mo ago
    What makes it nicer to use than Slack?
    - moeffju 4mo ago
      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.
- hendrikmans 4mo ago
  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 4mo ago
    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.
vsviridov 4mo ago
Amazing. And with SSO out of the box without weird "Oh, SSO is Enterprise only" BS.
toomuchtodo 4mo ago
Very cool! You should request being added to https://european-alternatives.eu/ https://european-alternatives.eu/
npodbielski 4mo 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 4mo 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 https://github.com/teal-bauer/chatto-tauri
  - npodbielski 4mo 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.
    - moeffju 4mo ago
      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 4mo ago
        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.
mertbio 4mo 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.
- budsniffer952 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - Cyberdog 4mo 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.
    - yard2010 4mo 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.
    - Quitschquat 4mo 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 4mo 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!
wxw 4mo 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/ 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.
- electriclove 4mo ago
  Can it be installed on Cloudflare or Vercel or something else that is easy/cheap/free?
  - uproarchat 4mo ago
    I run something similar with livekit, all on hetzner. its exceedingly affordable for a bunch of people at once to use it.
- OhSoHumble 4mo 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 4mo ago
    It's a first-class PWA currently but no native desktop apps yet.
    - tadfisher 4mo ago
      Sounds like something I could finally build with Kotlin Multiplatform...
acomagu 4mo ago
Would English speakers pronounce this as "Chat-to"? To a Japanese person, this clearly sounds like "Cha-tto," which simply means "chat."
- johntash 4mo ago
  I don't know what the "official" pronunciation is, but I would say "Chat-o" is probably right.
- bigfishrunning 4mo ago
  as an english speaker, i would pronounce it "chat-oh", but i'm open to correction
- Gualdrapo 4mo 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 4mo ago
  Linguist here. It would likely be pronounced with a flap/tap, i.e., it would rhyme with shadow
  - Peacefulz 4mo ago
    Let Chatto cast a shadow on your private communications! The marketing practically writes itself.
latexr 4mo 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?
- francislavoie 4mo ago
  Yeah a lot of them like Mattermost become surprisingly limited unless you pay. It's very annoying.
  - claytongulick 4mo 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.
- bityard 4mo 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.
frenchie4111 4mo 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 4mo ago
  Looks like it's planned. https://github.com/orgs/chattocorp/projects/1?pane=issue&itemId=202121285&issue=chattocorp%7Cchatto%7C995 https://github.com/orgs/chattocorp/projects/1?pane=issue&ite...
  - blooalien 4mo ago
    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.
- sneak 4mo 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.
  - renchap 4mo ago
    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.
  - modeless 4mo ago
simonw 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    - ineptech 4mo 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_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
      - sneak 4mo 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 4mo ago
      Nobody is prohibiting you from using modified AGPL software to run your business.
johntash 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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.
skybrian 4mo 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.)
- pzmarzly 4mo ago
  I hope they introduce some sort of public read-only view that an admin can enable. Discord has https://www.answeroverflow.com/ https://www.answeroverflow.com/ and https://www.linen.dev/ https://www.linen.dev/
icase 4mo ago
soooooo campfire then
- dewey 4mo 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.
- jkman 4mo ago
  Off the bat, it seems that campfire doesn't support voice/video calls. So no, not at all
- vsviridov 4mo 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.
Imustaskforhelp 4mo 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.
- roshannarma 4mo ago
  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 4mo ago
    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 https://fluxer.app/blog/mobile-clients-and-fluxer-v2 [2]: https://docs.fluxer.app/operator/get-started/ https://docs.fluxer.app/operator/get-started/ [3]: https://github.com/fluxerapp/fluxer https://github.com/fluxerapp/fluxer
    - lrae 4mo ago
      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 4mo ago
        Thanks! And you're right, the future federation work is what will make it possible to implement support for transferring communities across instances natively.
dormento 4mo 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! :)
- rootatixww3 4mo ago
  chudo missed opportunity
- brodock 4mo 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
  - projektfu 4mo ago
    Also annoyed/angry/cross.
  - andrepd 4mo ago
    There's a Hyundai car whose name literally means "pussy" in Portuguese and Galician x) It's marketed as something else in those territories.
    - celsoazevedo 4mo ago
      Hyundai Kona :D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_Kona https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_Kona
      - upcoming-sesame 4mo ago
        Don't forget the famous Mitsubishi Pajero (wanker)
    - numpad0 4mo ago
      And Toyota Venza which sound like "toilet seat" in... Japanese, of all languages...
dofm 4mo 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 4mo ago
  most complains i see about the others are performance-related, not looks-related. and chatto is trying to be performant.
  - dofm 4mo 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.
    - turtlebits 4mo ago
      Then don't use it? I don't get the hate just because it doesn't fit people's use cases.
      - dofm 4mo ago
        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.
hrdwdmrbl 4mo 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.
tempfile 4mo 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!)
sreekanth850 4mo ago
looks super cool.
uwemaurer 4mo ago
Looks great! How does it compare to Zulip? we self host zulip and are quite happy with it
- searchguy 4mo ago
  zulip for one, is not encrypted at rest.
  - fragmede 4mo ago
    at rest? Shouldn't that be there filesystem's job?
hackernows_test 4mo ago
I’m
theK 4mo ago
So encrypted at rest but no E2EE, did I read that right?
- NikxDa 4mo 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 4mo 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.
- hendrikmans 4mo ago
  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.)
Catloafdev 4mo ago
Looks great - is there any info on what server resources are actually required per feature or user count?
- hendrikmans 4mo ago
  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)
mikkelam 4mo 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.
- ilaksh 4mo ago
  Zulip has been open source since 2015.
  - mikkelam 4mo ago
    Zulip is bad
drBonkers 4mo ago
Needs drop in voice rooms a la Discord or Slack's Huddle
- moeffju 4mo ago
  It has audio and video call support in any room, so like huddle.
namegulf 4mo 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”'.
aitchnyu 4mo 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?
- hendrikmans 4mo ago
  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.
jacobgold 4mo 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.
- JoeBOFH 4mo ago
  XMPP exists…
- 0xbadcafebee 4mo 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.
  - moeffju 4mo ago
    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 4mo ago
    Oh, and the protobuf based realtime endpoint should make it very easy to build bridges, too.
    - 0xbadcafebee 4mo ago
      If the mission statement is no compatibility with anything else, they might break backwards compatibility with bridges frequently
Mongoose 4mo ago
Not knowing what Chatto is, the headline is giving "zendaya is meechee"
crote 4mo 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/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DiscordAlternatives/
azinman2 4mo 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 4mo ago
  Is e2e encryption supported?
  - azinman2 4mo ago
    I thought the point of chat control was to give the eu a back door even in e2e?
    - lrae 4mo ago
      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.
gverrilla 4mo ago
> "The fastest way to give it a try is through Homebrew" for the 12 people that own a macbook, perhaps.
- snazz 4mo ago
  Homebrew also runs on Linux, it’s a common way to install minor command line utilities on a immutable/atomic distro
- hendrikmans 4mo ago
  That still makes it the fastest way. ;-) You can download the binaries from the GitHub release pages.
ryss20 4mo ago
[flagged]
psarna 4mo ago
single executable with its own frontend is the way; I followed the pattern with https://worb.cloud https://worb.cloud . Nice for users but also extremely easy to have a short debugging feedback loop
fernando-ram 4mo ago
[flagged]
- Shalomboy 4mo ago
  you would love https://www.windy.com https://www.windy.com
  - fernando-ram 4mo ago
    lol you are correct!
robertlagrant 4mo 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.
- hendrikmans 4mo ago
  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 4mo ago
    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.
raaron773 4mo 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
urbandw311er 4mo ago
How does this compare to [SOME COMPETING THING I WANT TO PROMOTE]?
- qdotme 4mo ago
  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.
ferfumarma 4mo 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?
- moeffju 4mo ago
  Whimsy? ^^
- hendrikmans 4mo ago
  Where we're going, we don't need search engine rankings!
HeadOfProbing 4mo ago
Seems neat
duttish 4mo 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.
- anonym29 4mo ago
  Employers may not be the target audience.
  - duttish 4mo ago
    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 4mo ago
      Lots of non-work organisations use tools like Slack.
- moeffju 4mo ago
  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 4mo ago
    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.
- hendrikmans 4mo ago
  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.
tomgs 4mo ago
I joined the chat as well, but if Hendrik is here - we'd love to have you on the channel (https://youtube.com/@WithMultiplesAI https://youtube.com/@WithMultiplesAI). This will make for one hell of an episode, I think.
- czottmann 4mo ago
  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 4mo ago
    Yep, would be very cool and it was a great live call
beart 4mo ago
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 4mo ago
  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 4mo ago
    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 4mo ago
      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.
brcmthrowaway 4mo ago
How does it differ to Zulip?
- upcoming-sesame 4mo ago
  Or matrix
  - moeffju 4mo ago
    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 4mo ago
  voice chat?
jdthedisciple 4mo ago
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 4mo ago
  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.
  - attila-lendvai 4mo ago
    mass collection? Snowden?
  - mkl 4mo ago
    The way they plan to make money is paid hosting.
Crowberry 4mo ago
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 :)
thesmurfofeval 4mo ago
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.
qdotme 4mo ago
How does it compare to Mattermost?
- ilaksh 4mo ago
  From what I can see, the license for this (AGPL) is more restrictive than Zulip (Apache 2). So I would stick with Zulip.
runalldiaynoche 4mo ago
Would love to see mobile support, and a way to import/migrate from Slack. If migration is painless, our org would adopt this.
- hendrikmans 4mo ago
  Both are planned, but ETA is uncertain unfortunately.
wonkyfruit 4mo ago
Congratulations. This is really awesome to see. Thank you! :D
- hendrikmans 4mo ago
  Thank you!
bigwhite 4mo ago
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 4mo ago
  You can self-host Chatto with zero limitations without having to pay me.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
apitman 4mo ago
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 4mo ago
  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 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.)
- beasubs 4mo ago
  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 https://github.com/bogpad/meepachat
- hendrikmans 4mo ago
  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 4mo ago
    Then wouldn't servers need to trust each other? Otherwise I could use my server to log into any other server.
- kalaksi 4mo ago
  > 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.
luciana1u 4mo ago
[flagged]
ygouzerh 4mo ago
What are the pros and cons versus Rocket.Chat?
artooro 4mo ago
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 4mo ago
  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 4mo ago
  Chatto does have full SSO support (OIDC and some selected providers like Google, GitHub, and, ironically, Discord, with more coming in the next releases.)
suis_siva 4mo ago
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 4mo ago
  > I've tried (and failed) Why did it fail?
Curtis_Guan 4mo ago
[dead]
awesomeusername 4mo ago
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.
est 4mo ago
> 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 4mo ago
  Sadly I don't even think 50 communities exist at this point! :-P
miki123211 4mo ago
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 4mo ago
  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.
miki123211 4mo ago
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 4mo ago
  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 4mo ago
    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.
vivzkestrel 4mo ago
- 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?
criticalfault 4mo ago
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
onel 4mo ago
This looks really nice. Great job. Looking at adding it to the malmo.network store for self-hosters
bdbm 4mo ago
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!
elhart05 4mo ago
[dead]
chickensong 4mo ago
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
thomas-mc-work 4mo ago
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 4mo ago
  This should be the source: https://github.com/chattocorp/chatto/tree/main/apps/docs-website 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 4mo ago
    Thank you! I especially like the subtle animated diagram here: https://docs.chatto.run/guides/deployment/docker-compose/#architecture https://docs.chatto.run/guides/deployment/docker-compose/#ar...
pjg 4mo ago
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.

1106 points by speckx 4mo 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?

DANmode 4mo 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.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
moeffju 4mo 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 4mo ago
  What makes it nicer to use than Slack?
  - moeffju 4mo ago
    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.
hendrikmans 4mo ago
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 4mo ago
  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.

vsviridov 4mo ago

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

toomuchtodo 4mo ago

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

npodbielski 4mo 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 4mo 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 https://github.com/teal-bauer/chatto-tauri
- npodbielski 4mo 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.
  - moeffju 4mo ago
    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 4mo ago
      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.

mertbio 4mo 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.

budsniffer952 4mo ago
[flagged]
- Cyberdog 4mo 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.
  - yard2010 4mo 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.
  - Quitschquat 4mo 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 4mo 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!

wxw 4mo 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/ 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.

electriclove 4mo ago
Can it be installed on Cloudflare or Vercel or something else that is easy/cheap/free?
- uproarchat 4mo ago
  I run something similar with livekit, all on hetzner. its exceedingly affordable for a bunch of people at once to use it.
OhSoHumble 4mo 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 4mo ago
  It's a first-class PWA currently but no native desktop apps yet.
  - tadfisher 4mo ago
    Sounds like something I could finally build with Kotlin Multiplatform...

acomagu 4mo ago

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

johntash 4mo ago
I don't know what the "official" pronunciation is, but I would say "Chat-o" is probably right.
bigfishrunning 4mo ago
as an english speaker, i would pronounce it "chat-oh", but i'm open to correction
Gualdrapo 4mo 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 4mo ago
Linguist here. It would likely be pronounced with a flap/tap, i.e., it would rhyme with shadow
- Peacefulz 4mo ago
  Let Chatto cast a shadow on your private communications! The marketing practically writes itself.

latexr 4mo 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?

francislavoie 4mo ago
Yeah a lot of them like Mattermost become surprisingly limited unless you pay. It's very annoying.
- claytongulick 4mo 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.
bityard 4mo 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.

frenchie4111 4mo 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 4mo ago
Looks like it's planned. https://github.com/orgs/chattocorp/projects/1?pane=issue&itemId=202121285&issue=chattocorp%7Cchatto%7C995 https://github.com/orgs/chattocorp/projects/1?pane=issue&ite...
- blooalien 4mo ago
  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.
sneak 4mo 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.
- renchap 4mo ago
  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.
- modeless 4mo ago

simonw 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - ineptech 4mo 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_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
    - sneak 4mo 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 4mo ago
    Nobody is prohibiting you from using modified AGPL software to run your business.

johntash 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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.

skybrian 4mo 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.)

pzmarzly 4mo ago
I hope they introduce some sort of public read-only view that an admin can enable. Discord has https://www.answeroverflow.com/ https://www.answeroverflow.com/ and https://www.linen.dev/ https://www.linen.dev/

icase 4mo ago

soooooo campfire then

dewey 4mo 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.
jkman 4mo ago
Off the bat, it seems that campfire doesn't support voice/video calls. So no, not at all
vsviridov 4mo 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.

Imustaskforhelp 4mo 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.

roshannarma 4mo ago
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 4mo ago
  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 https://fluxer.app/blog/mobile-clients-and-fluxer-v2 [2]: https://docs.fluxer.app/operator/get-started/ https://docs.fluxer.app/operator/get-started/ [3]: https://github.com/fluxerapp/fluxer https://github.com/fluxerapp/fluxer
  - lrae 4mo ago
    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 4mo ago
      Thanks! And you're right, the future federation work is what will make it possible to implement support for transferring communities across instances natively.

dormento 4mo 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! :)

rootatixww3 4mo ago
chudo missed opportunity
brodock 4mo 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
- projektfu 4mo ago
  Also annoyed/angry/cross.
- andrepd 4mo ago
  There's a Hyundai car whose name literally means "pussy" in Portuguese and Galician x) It's marketed as something else in those territories.
  - celsoazevedo 4mo ago
    Hyundai Kona :D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_Kona https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_Kona
    - upcoming-sesame 4mo ago
      Don't forget the famous Mitsubishi Pajero (wanker)
  - numpad0 4mo ago
    And Toyota Venza which sound like "toilet seat" in... Japanese, of all languages...

dofm 4mo 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 4mo ago
most complains i see about the others are performance-related, not looks-related. and chatto is trying to be performant.
- dofm 4mo 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.
  - turtlebits 4mo ago
    Then don't use it? I don't get the hate just because it doesn't fit people's use cases.
    - dofm 4mo ago
      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.

hrdwdmrbl 4mo 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.

tempfile 4mo 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!)

sreekanth850 4mo ago

looks super cool.

uwemaurer 4mo ago

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

searchguy 4mo ago
zulip for one, is not encrypted at rest.
- fragmede 4mo ago
  at rest? Shouldn't that be there filesystem's job?

hackernows_test 4mo ago

I’m

theK 4mo ago

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

NikxDa 4mo 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 4mo 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.
hendrikmans 4mo ago
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.)

Catloafdev 4mo ago

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

hendrikmans 4mo ago
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)

mikkelam 4mo 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.

ilaksh 4mo ago
Zulip has been open source since 2015.
- mikkelam 4mo ago
  Zulip is bad

drBonkers 4mo ago

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

moeffju 4mo ago
It has audio and video call support in any room, so like huddle.

namegulf 4mo 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”'.

aitchnyu 4mo 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?

hendrikmans 4mo ago
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.

jacobgold 4mo 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.

JoeBOFH 4mo ago
XMPP exists…
0xbadcafebee 4mo 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.
- moeffju 4mo ago
  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 4mo ago
  Oh, and the protobuf based realtime endpoint should make it very easy to build bridges, too.
  - 0xbadcafebee 4mo ago
    If the mission statement is no compatibility with anything else, they might break backwards compatibility with bridges frequently

Mongoose 4mo ago

Not knowing what Chatto is, the headline is giving "zendaya is meechee"

crote 4mo 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/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DiscordAlternatives/

azinman2 4mo 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 4mo ago
Is e2e encryption supported?
- azinman2 4mo ago
  I thought the point of chat control was to give the eu a back door even in e2e?
  - lrae 4mo ago
    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.

gverrilla 4mo ago

> "The fastest way to give it a try is through Homebrew" for the 12 people that own a macbook, perhaps.

snazz 4mo ago
Homebrew also runs on Linux, it’s a common way to install minor command line utilities on a immutable/atomic distro
hendrikmans 4mo ago
That still makes it the fastest way. ;-) You can download the binaries from the GitHub release pages.

ryss20 4mo ago

[flagged]

psarna 4mo ago

single executable with its own frontend is the way; I followed the pattern with https://worb.cloud https://worb.cloud . Nice for users but also extremely easy to have a short debugging feedback loop

fernando-ram 4mo ago

[flagged]

Shalomboy 4mo ago
you would love https://www.windy.com https://www.windy.com
- fernando-ram 4mo ago
  lol you are correct!

robertlagrant 4mo 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.

hendrikmans 4mo ago
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 4mo ago
  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.

raaron773 4mo 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

urbandw311er 4mo ago

How does this compare to [SOME COMPETING THING I WANT TO PROMOTE]?

qdotme 4mo ago
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.

ferfumarma 4mo 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?

moeffju 4mo ago
Whimsy? ^^
hendrikmans 4mo ago
Where we're going, we don't need search engine rankings!

HeadOfProbing 4mo ago

Seems neat

duttish 4mo 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.

anonym29 4mo ago
Employers may not be the target audience.
- duttish 4mo ago
  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 4mo ago
    Lots of non-work organisations use tools like Slack.
moeffju 4mo ago
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 4mo ago
  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.
hendrikmans 4mo ago
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.

tomgs 4mo ago

I joined the chat as well, but if Hendrik is here - we'd love to have you on the channel (https://youtube.com/@WithMultiplesAI https://youtube.com/@WithMultiplesAI). This will make for one hell of an episode, I think.

czottmann 4mo ago
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 4mo ago
  Yep, would be very cool and it was a great live call

beart 4mo ago

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 4mo ago
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 4mo ago
  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 4mo ago
    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.

brcmthrowaway 4mo ago

How does it differ to Zulip?

upcoming-sesame 4mo ago
Or matrix
- moeffju 4mo ago
  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 4mo ago
voice chat?

jdthedisciple 4mo ago

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 4mo ago
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.
- attila-lendvai 4mo ago
  mass collection? Snowden?
- mkl 4mo ago
  The way they plan to make money is paid hosting.

Crowberry 4mo ago

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 :)

thesmurfofeval 4mo ago

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.

qdotme 4mo ago

How does it compare to Mattermost?

ilaksh 4mo ago
From what I can see, the license for this (AGPL) is more restrictive than Zulip (Apache 2). So I would stick with Zulip.

runalldiaynoche 4mo ago

Would love to see mobile support, and a way to import/migrate from Slack. If migration is painless, our org would adopt this.

hendrikmans 4mo ago
Both are planned, but ETA is uncertain unfortunately.

wonkyfruit 4mo ago

Congratulations. This is really awesome to see. Thank you! :D

hendrikmans 4mo ago
Thank you!

bigwhite 4mo ago

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 4mo ago
You can self-host Chatto with zero limitations without having to pay me.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

apitman 4mo ago

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 4mo ago
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 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.)
beasubs 4mo ago
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 https://github.com/bogpad/meepachat
hendrikmans 4mo ago
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 4mo ago
  Then wouldn't servers need to trust each other? Otherwise I could use my server to log into any other server.
kalaksi 4mo ago
> 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.

luciana1u 4mo ago

[flagged]

ygouzerh 4mo ago

What are the pros and cons versus Rocket.Chat?

artooro 4mo ago

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 4mo ago
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 4mo ago
Chatto does have full SSO support (OIDC and some selected providers like Google, GitHub, and, ironically, Discord, with more coming in the next releases.)

suis_siva 4mo ago

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 4mo ago
> I've tried (and failed) Why did it fail?

Curtis_Guan 4mo ago

[dead]

awesomeusername 4mo ago

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.

est 4mo ago

> 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 4mo ago
Sadly I don't even think 50 communities exist at this point! :-P

miki123211 4mo ago

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 4mo ago
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.

miki123211 4mo ago

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 4mo ago
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 4mo ago
  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.

vivzkestrel 4mo ago

- 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?

criticalfault 4mo ago

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

onel 4mo ago

This looks really nice. Great job. Looking at adding it to the malmo.network store for self-hosters

bdbm 4mo ago

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!

elhart05 4mo ago

[dead]

chickensong 4mo ago

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

thomas-mc-work 4mo ago

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 4mo ago
This should be the source: https://github.com/chattocorp/chatto/tree/main/apps/docs-website 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 4mo ago
  Thank you! I especially like the subtle animated diagram here: https://docs.chatto.run/guides/deployment/docker-compose/#architecture https://docs.chatto.run/guides/deployment/docker-compose/#ar...

pjg 4mo ago

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.