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Hendrik Mans
@hmans.dev

👀 Some words about Chatto, my BIG project. It's a group chat app that - is incredibly easy to self-host - has very modest hardware requirements - scales really well - apache-2.0 license - hosted platform launching in 2026 Looking forward to writing much more about this soon. Let's do this. 🚀

hmans.devIntroducing ChattoI'm building an Open Source group chat application that's simple to self-host, familiar to use, and easy to customize.

16 reposts70 likes

Hurrdurr
@devhurrdurr.bsky.social

Exciting! I’d really want a proper self hosted alternative to the existing services that harvest more data than we’re willing to give, or are expensive. Are there any plans for iOS and Android native apps? Chat + apps is quite the undertaking but a man can dream 🥹

Hendrik Mans
@hmans.dev

Native mobile apps are currently a non-goal for me personally, but we'll see what the future brings. I'm personally very big on PWA approaches, also because there are some UI things I want to do that I'd hate to have to maintain across three separate codebases. :P

Hendrik Mans
@hmans.dev

So, realistically, the mobile app roadmap sort of looks like this: 1) no app at all, users will just use their browsers 2) add PWA bits to the web app 3) make native apps that basically just wrap the web UI, but provide native push notifications 4) ??? (For me, 3 is good enough)

Dumdeedum
@dumdeedum.bsky.social

Makes me sad the IRC 3.0 project never seemed to go anywhere. IRC is probably the most overlooked dead tech now that everything is web, and I've been saying for years it should be brought up to date, but not tied to a single company who'll either start off evil or turn evil eventually.

Adriaan
@adriaan.games

interested! currently using zulip and happy with it after using slack (stupid expensive), mattermost (bloated with useless features and ux is off), campfire (halfbaked), and rocketchat (bad UX). two downsides of zulip: mobile app is still a baby, and push notifications are paid after 10 users :(

Hendrik Mans
@hmans.dev

Zulip is good! But from my experience its paradigm is too far removed from what people are used to from the Slacks and the Discords and the whatnots. It was particularly hard to make a case for it in a business context.

Hendrik Mans
@hmans.dev

I want to build something that works both for business as well as community/gaming/casual use cases. Gunning for the "typical" UX as a base and then try some things on top of that (particularly around threading, room types and the likes.)