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)
Chatto is now open source
21–30 of 319 posts
Re: Chatto is now open source
#22What'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?
Re: Chatto is now open source
#23Very 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.
Re: Chatto is now open source
#24I’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.
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Re: Chatto is now open source
#25> 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?
Yeah a lot of them like Mattermost become surprisingly limited unless you pay. It's very annoying.
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.
Re: Chatto is now open source
#26I’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.)
Re: Chatto is now open source
#27soooooo campfire then
Re: Chatto is now open source
#28soooooo campfire then
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.
Re: Chatto is now open source
#29Congrats 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.
Re: Chatto is now open source
#30What'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?
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.