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Chatto is now open source

hmans.dev

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Re: Chatto is now open source

#251

Post by imtringued »

urbandw311er wrote: post #110
ori_b wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Well that’s just snarky and not very nice. The guy has 30 years experience as a dev according to a sibling comment so it’s not as though it’s some vibe coded junk. Why do you believe a good dev can’t use AI to assist in writing great code?

You tell me he has 30 years of experience, then you tell me that he developed the chat app in a way that negates those 30 years of experience.

Like, either the 30 years matter or they don't. If you're using agentic coding, while copying the two most popular chat applications (Discord and Matrix/Element), you'll need 5 years of development experience at most.

The big thing about AI is that it lets you explore a new domain outside your expertise almost effortlessly.

Re: Chatto is now open source

#252

Post by pjerem »

Drupon wrote: post #197
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.

How is that fascinating? That's what makes up most of the tedious Show HN posts these days.

There is a difference between vibe coding (asking an agent to generate an app from specifications) and leveraging agents to go faster on your vision. You can still decide to control the technical architecture and decisions and just let agents type on your behalf.

Re: Chatto is now open source

#253

Post by duttish »

moeffju wrote: post #172
duttish wrote: post #127

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.

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 :)

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.

Re: Chatto is now open source

#254

Post by AlexeyBelov »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #62
budsniffer952 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

These kind of comments just spike the conversation and leave no room for nuanced opinions or discussion. A lot of garbage is also being produced and a lot of people have to clean it up, right? Hopefully that’s not too controversial of statement?

> These kind of comments just spike the conversation and leave no room for nuanced opinions or discussion.

It's a 20-something day old account.

Re: Chatto is now open source

#255

Post by hendrikmans »

OhSoHumble wrote: post #49
wxw wrote: post #10

> 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-…

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.

Hi, I'm making Chatto!

Chatto so far fully commits to providing a great PWA experience. The screenshot you're seeing is of the PWA.

I'm aware that a lot of people want desktop and mobile apps. These will be coming at some point, at least as wrappers around the PWA.

Re: Chatto is now open source

#256

Post by hendrikmans »

duttish wrote: post #127

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.

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.

Re: Chatto is now open source

#257

Post by hendrikmans »

miki123211 wrote: post #234

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...

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.

Re: Chatto is now open source

#258

Post by hendrikmans »

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)

Chatto currently commits to providing a strong PWA experience that also works great on mobile (including full support for voice and video calls, push notifications, the works.)

I am aware though that a lot of people would prefer an app that they can install, so this will be coming at some point -- just not a huge priority at the current point in the project's timeline.

Re: Chatto is now open source

#259

Post by hendrikmans »

robertlagrant wrote: post #106

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.

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.

Re: Chatto is now open source

#260

Post by hendrikmans »

miki123211 wrote: post #235

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)

I'm assuming you're talking about Apple Push Notification Service.

Chatto so far commits to a fully fleshed out PWA experience. Push Notifications are delivered through Web Push (and Apple's Declarative Web Push additions). Web Push uses the browser vendors' own push gateways.

There are some missing bits currently in Chatto's multi-server story; when you add another server within the UI, its push notifications won't work because the other server can't make its service worker known to your device. One of the next versions of Chatto will improve this significantly, eg. with Chatto servers being able to act as push relays for others.

Eventually there's going to be mobile apps operated and provided by ChattoCorp, who will also set up and pay for the required push services.

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