Chatto is now open source • Hacker News Board

Re: Chatto is now open source

#91

Post by andrepd » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 6:46 PM UTC

brodock wrote: post #85

dormento wrote: post #32

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! :)

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

There's a Hyundai car whose name literally means "pussy" in Portuguese and Galician x) It's marketed as something else in those territories.

Re: Chatto is now open source

#92

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 6:50 PM UTC

ori_b wrote: post #77

mertbio wrote: post #9

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.

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: Chatto is now open source

#93

Post by ryss20 » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 6:50 PM UTC

[flagged]

Re: Chatto is now open source

#94

Post by crote » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 6:52 PM UTC

nullbio wrote: post #69

budsniffer952 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It took him a year to build. So yeah, obviously if someone spends a year working on something with an LLM they can produce a good product. The slop we're seeing from people using AI is because they pump it out in a month or two and then call it a day.

The big question is: how do we tell the difference?

If 99.9% of LLM-smelling projects is vibecoded garbage, why should anyone assume that your LLM-smelling project is the 0.1%? If I spend all day digging through dogshit to find the one diamond, I'll just end up going home empty-handed smelling of dogshit.

AI tells are a giant red flag indicating to potential users not to waste time on it. Want people to take your new pet project seriously? Don't use AI! And yes, that does include even the genius 100x engineers who can use LLMs responsibly.

Re: Chatto is now open source

#95

Post by gverrilla » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 6:52 PM UTC

> "The fastest way to give it a try is through Homebrew"

for the 12 people that own a macbook, perhaps.

Re: Chatto is now open source

#96

Post by pkulak » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 6:52 PM UTC

ezst wrote: post #54

johntash wrote: post #23

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.

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 an…

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.

Re: Chatto is now open source

#97

Post by sneak » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 6:53 PM UTC

frenchie4111 wrote: post #21

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)

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.

Re: Chatto is now open source

#98

Post by vsviridov » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 6:54 PM UTC

icase wrote: post #27

soooooo campfire then

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.

Re: Chatto is now open source

#99

Post by snazz » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 6:55 PM UTC

gverrilla wrote: post #95

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

Homebrew also runs on Linux, it’s a common way to install minor command line utilities on a immutable/atomic distro

Re: Chatto is now open source

#100

Post by jacobgold » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 6:55 PM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #79

jacobgold wrote: post #68

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…

But the point here is that you don't want the network effects. You want a chat server for people you know and explicitly invite, for a specific purpose, under your control. Maybe you want the data to never leave your colocated box and your VPN, and your server to have no public presence at all. There are things that Slack cannot easily offer.

You want the open protocol to have network effects, not a proprietary company's product.

Email worked out pretty well, while IRC failed for reasons that are probably correctable.