Hacker News: hendrikmans

New comment by hendrikmans in "Hubble: Open-source notetaking app for you and your agents"

hendrikmans — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:34:29 +0000

What would make Rust better for this type of app compared to Node?

Chatto is Robots

hendrikmans — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 14:46:29 +0000

Article URL: https://www.hmans.dev/blog/chatto-is-robots

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48935347

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by hendrikmans in "Chatto is now open source"

hendrikmans — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 09:24:37 +0000

Hi, Chatto developer here.

NATS and its built-in Jetstream stream persistence engine are a miracle. I love them both so much. And if your app is itself written in Go, you can just embed them for simple deployment scenarios (like Chatto does.)

New comment by hendrikmans in "Chatto is now open source"

hendrikmans — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 08:48:35 +0000

That still makes it the fastest way. ;-)

You can download the binaries from the GitHub release pages.

New comment by hendrikmans in "Chatto is now open source"

hendrikmans — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 08:47:35 +0000

I love Fluxer! Hampus is cool and what he's built is super impressive.

I would say the primary difference is that Chatto doesn't squarely aim for being a _Discord_ alternative. There are no plans for providing a Discord-compatible API (which I think Fluxer does.)

The other main difference is that Chatto is designed, on purpose, to serve individual communities from tiny deployments, instead of large mega-instances that power many communities. Chatto deliberately avoids content federation to remain compatible with business use cases, and also to stay simple enough so it can run from a single binary.

New comment by hendrikmans in "Chatto is now open source"

hendrikmans — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 08:44:50 +0000

Both are planned, but ETA is uncertain unfortunately.

New comment by hendrikmans in "Chatto is now open source"

hendrikmans — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 08:44:21 +0000

Still figuring out the numbers, so very hard to answer at the moment. Chatto is quite lightweight though; a fresh instance will run at tens of MB of RAM usage. RAM usage then scales with activity and CCU; on the Chatto HQ server, I'm currently seeing around 10 MB per additional connected user. I want this to be less, there's probably lots of room for optimization.

(You can scale Chatto horizontally across as many processes and servers as you need, so communities with tens of thousands of CCU should be perfectly feasible. But as you can imagine, there's precious little real-world proof for this yet :b)

New comment by hendrikmans in "Chatto is now open source"

hendrikmans — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 08:41:22 +0000

Thank you!

New comment by hendrikmans in "Chatto is now open source"

hendrikmans — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 08:41:07 +0000

There are plans for making individual rooms public, allowing unauthenticated users to access them (or allowing crawlers to index the content), but so far those plans do not include any sort of write access.

New comment by hendrikmans in "Chatto is now open source"

hendrikmans — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 08:39:44 +0000

Chatto does have full SSO support (OIDC and some selected providers like Google, GitHub, and, ironically, Discord, with more coming in the next releases.)

New comment by hendrikmans in "Chatto is now open source"

hendrikmans — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 08:38:25 +0000

In terms of inspiration and also the market that I want to go after with Chatto Cloud, this is definitely aiming to be an alternative to Slack, Teams, Mattermost et al. I've tried to make it friendly and casual enough to _also_ work as a Discord alternative, though.

New comment by hendrikmans in "Chatto is now open source"

hendrikmans — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 08:36:37 +0000

Where we're going, we don't need search engine rankings!

New comment by hendrikmans in "Chatto is now open source"

hendrikmans — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 08:35:54 +0000

Yes, Chatto's core system does not use e2ee. This is by design; if there ever are e2ee features -- and chances are good they will, in some shape -- the encryption will be layered on top of that (encrypted message payloads and such.)

New comment by hendrikmans in "Chatto is now open source"

hendrikmans — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 08:34:43 +0000

Sadly I don't even think 50 communities exist at this point! :-P

New comment by hendrikmans in "Chatto is now open source"

hendrikmans — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 08:34:12 +0000

Each Chatto server by design is entirely isolated, including user accounts. But I'm aware that having to email-signup on every server you want to hang out in would eventually be too annoying. I'm exploring some lightweight identity federation ideas that I hope to ship with 0.5 where you can use your Chatto account on one server to log into another server (if it's configured to allow this.)

New comment by hendrikmans in "Chatto is now open source"

hendrikmans — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 08:32:34 +0000

You can self-host Chatto with zero limitations without having to pay me.

New comment by hendrikmans in "Chatto is now open source"

hendrikmans — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 08:31:51 +0000

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.

New comment by hendrikmans in "Chatto is now open source"

hendrikmans — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 08:23:46 +0000

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.

New comment by hendrikmans in "Chatto is now open source"

hendrikmans — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 08:20:03 +0000

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.

New comment by hendrikmans in "Chatto is now open source"

hendrikmans — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 08:18:49 +0000

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.