Chatto is now Open Source

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• Hacker News
• > 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.

  by dofm
• most complains i see about the others are performance-related, not looks-related. and chatto is trying to be performant.
  by john_strinlai
• soooooo campfire then
  by icase
• 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.
  by dewey
• > 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?

  by latexr
• Yeah a lot of them like Mattermost become surprisingly limited unless you pay. It's very annoying.
  by francislavoie
• 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.
  by bityard
• Amazing. And with SSO out of the box without weird "Oh, SSO is Enterprise only" BS.
  by vsviridov
• Very cool! You should request being added to https://european-alternatives.eu/
  by toomuchtodo
• 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.
  by npodbielski
• 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
  by moeffju
• 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.
  by hrdwdmrbl
• 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!)
  by tempfile
• 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.

  by Imustaskforhelp
• 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
  by roshannarma
• 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?
  by theturtletalks
• > 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.

  by DANmode
• 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 :)

  by moeffju
• 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.)

  by skybrian
• I hope they introduce some sort of public read-only view that an admin can enable. Discord has https://www.answeroverflow.com/ and https://www.linen.dev/
  by pzmarzly
• Would English speakers pronounce this as "Chat-to"? To a Japanese person, this clearly sounds like "Cha-tto," which simply means "chat."
  by acomagu
• 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
  by Gualdrapo
• I don't know what the "official" pronunciation is, but I would say "Chat-o" is probably right.
  by johntash
• as an english speaker, i would pronounce it "chat-oh", but i'm open to correction
  by bigfishrunning
• looks super cool.
  by sreekanth850
• 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
• AGPL stops others from running a competing cloud service using the Go backend. It does nothing for the frontend except scare off enterprise users.
  by ricardobeat
• 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.

  by goodroot
• 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.

  by johntash
• 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