Post

Hendrik Mans
@hmans.dev

Today is probably a fine day to mention that I've been working on a self-hostable Discordslacklike called Chatto. It's steadily moving towards feature parity with the big kids, with everything crammed into a single compact 50 MB executable that can run off the cheapest VM you can find.

80 reposts270 likes

haz
@haz.re

It seems interesting but one question I have is that will it tackle the cross talk between different instances? I also heard of the term spaces being used. Can you clarify what that means?

Hendrik Mans
@hmans.dev

There is no cross-instance federation planned for this (on purpose). I do have some ideas for some basic cross-instance features down the road, but this isn't intended to be another Matrix.

leah 🛸
@spacegirl.ing

i think you fundementally misunderstand the demographic that this and other discord-like solutions are presumably meant for...

Hendrik Mans
@hmans.dev

I'm not terribly familiar with them, but Chatto is so lightweight, it can run off of my cheap Chinese Gameboy emulator handheld, so I would wager... yes? It's a single 50 MB executable/image and doesn't need a whole lot of resources.

Hendrik Mans
@hmans.dev

2FA: yes VCs: I'm assuming you mean video calls? Yes Codebase: it's beautiful (what are you interested in specifically?)

Autumn
@autumn.bsky.gay

Awesome. Main thing I’m curious about is the frontend. Also, much memory/CPU usage is your staging instance using?

Hendrik Mans
@hmans.dev

Frontend is a SvelteKit app compiled in SPA mode and embedded into (and served straight from) the executable. RAM: the dev server is using a 3x chatto and 1x NATS setup (way too much for what the instance needs, but I wanted to try this type of setup), "MEM" column is MB used:

0r0ch1
@0r0ch1.bsky.social

It is so you can assign roles based on Patreon or SubscribeStar pledge tiers, so that the users can access exclusive content while in the "notdiscord" client The accounts would be linked to the user's Patreon/SubStar account so that their bots can automatically manage those roles

Hendrik Mans
@hmans.dev

I'll look into it! Couldn't say for sure at this point if this would be something built into the app itself or just be an integration that uses the API, but we'll figure this out. Thanks for pushing me onto this!

Regner
@regner.blok-andersen.com

Please don’t put SSO behind paywall. It turns me and many others off of a project very quickly. One of the biggest issues I have with Discord is how it locks information away. Will it be possible to make channels, especially forum type ones, visible and indexed by search engines?

Hendrik Mans
@hmans.dev

SSO: Chatto will in fact be SSO-only, so it's not going to be behind a paywall at all! (But it'll initially only speak OIDC, so if you need SAML/LDAP/OAuth, you'll need to bridge it with another IdP.)

Hendrik Mans
@hmans.dev

re public rooms, yes, Chatto will allow you to make individual rooms public (but only in a read-only manner.) You can put rooms into different modes (chat, forum, social feed) and use those for your public comms, too.

Dustin
@dustycode.dev

what perfect timing, I just recently got into self-hosting and was just looking into discord alternatives after The News

Brandon Tan
@brandontan888.bsky.social

Self-hosting is having a renaissance. Matrix, Mattermost, Revolt all viable now. The pattern: centralized service betrays users, exodus to self-hosted alternatives, tooling improves, cycle repeats. Docker + Tailscale made self-hosting accessible to non-sysadmins. The barrier has never been lower.

Dustin
@dustycode.dev

discovering tailscale is really what gave me motivation to finally do something with the mini PC I've had sitting on my desk for about a year. I had previously been de-motivated by the thought of only being able to access stuff while I'm home or the fear of opening up ports