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Discussion summary

Chatto is an open-source, self-hosted group chat app aiming for performance and user enjoyment, with EU hosting options. Discussions highlight its features like free self-hosting and built-in SSO, contrasting with other apps that often require payments for advanced features.

What the discussion says

  • Chatto emphasizes performance and user experience.
  • Many open-source chat apps have limitations or require payments.
  • Some users prefer self-hosted solutions with integrated SSO.
“Chatto aims to be the group chat app you actually enjoy using.”
— dofm
“Many open-source chat apps are limited unless you pay.”
— francislavoie

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  • Hacker News
  • 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?

    by simonw
  • 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.

    by jdthedisciple
  • 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".

    by beart
  • 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)
    by frenchie4111
  • 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! :)

    by dormento
  • 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.

    by duttish
  • 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.
    by mertbio
  • > 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.

    by wxw

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