The Chatto FAQ

Well, the last couple of weeks have been quite exciting, to say the least! Chatto has been gaining in visibility, with a stready influx of brave testers creating accounts on the official Chatto community instance to give the thing a try and see what it’s all about. (Turns out it’s about chat! Amazing!)

Naturally, there have been questions, so let me try and answer the most frequently asked ones here. If you have a question that isn’t answered here, please get in touch via Bluesky.

Is Chatto real?

It absolutely is! Well, at least I think it is! Give it a try and see for yourself. And maybe report back to me. I can never be too sure.

(Yes, this was a real question that I got asked. Multiple times.)

Where is the source?

As of today, the repository is still closed. I’m working on opening things up soon, and would like to ask you for just a little bit more patience while I’m getting things into place.

Where are the binaries?

They will become available as soon as the repository is opened (see above).

Where is insert feature here? You should do thing. Why doesn’t it do other thing? This expletive expletive, expletive, you expletive

I appreciate all the feedback I’m getting on Chatto, but please do keep in mind that it’s still very early days. Chatto is still deeply alpha quality software, with many features missing entirely, or only being implemented in a basic first version. I’m working my butt off to make Chatto the best chat app on the planet, but this takes time, and whatever potential shortcuts are out there will be to nobody’s benefit.

Having said that, I know it’s on me to communicate the state of the app and its roadmap more clearly. Expect some news on this soon.

Is Chatto federated?

Not in the sense that you know federation from systems like Mastodon or Matrix. Any style of federation that ingests one instance’s data into another is 100% a non-feature for Chatto, as I’m trying to put its focus on privacy, safety, and compliance.

There are, however, plans for opt-in identity federation that will make it easier to have a single shared identity across separate instances (and yes, the client will allow you to connect to multiple instances at once.)

I want to make Chatto feel like a big, tightly integrated platform — while leaving it up to each instance’s operator to decide how deeply they want to participate in it. This is a hard (but fun) problem to tackle. But Chatto is not going to be some kind of decentralized social network type thing, or establish some sort of new protocol, or whatever. There are enough apps out there that do exactly that.

Can I self-host Chatto?

Absolutely, and you’re going to freaking love it!

As soon as source and binaries are available, you can easily plop it on your favorite VM and that’s it. Chatto is extremely lightweight and will easily serve most self-hosted communities from a single process, but if you want things to be slightly more scalable and, frankly, cooler, we’ll provide the usual pile of Docker images and Compose configurations, Helm charts, and whatnot.

Binaries will be available for Linux, macOS, and, ironically, Windows, both x86_64 and arm64 each. If you host Chatto on Windows ARM, I want to get to know you, you incredible bastard.

What is Chatto Cloud?

Chatto Cloud is an upcoming hosted services that you can use instead of self-hosting your instance. In Chatto Cloud you’ll get a managed instance with zero-downtime upgrades, daily backups and other goodies (depending on plan).

Cloud and self-hosted instances will be functionally equivalent, and you will be able to migrate from one to the other at any point.

Chatto Cloud is slated for launch this Summer. Stay tuned for news.

Does Chatto have video/voice calls?

Absolutely! Do I look like an amateur to you? Pffssshh. And yeah, they also work in self-hosted instances.

Will there be native apps for mobile and/or desktop?

For the time being, Chatto fully leans on Progressive Web Apps (PWA), which have come a very long way in the last few years, and other modern Web APIs. Push Notifications are sent through Web Push, video calls will use WebRTC, notification sounds are synthesized using the Web Audio API, and so on.

Will there eventually be native apps? I can’t say, but never say never. But as of today, they’re not on the roadmap.

Will it suport ATProto/ActivityPub/XMPP/IRC?

Not beyond allowing signing in with (some of) these as another identity factor.

Is there going to be age verification?!

Wait, what? Oh! I know why you’re asking.

Okay, look. Here’s the thing. We all know that things are getting stricter out there. If you self-host your Chatto instance, what you do or won’t do with it is entirely your business, but let’s be real; any large platform (especially if it’s hosted in Europe) will eventually come under scrutiny, may face this issue, and have to comply. Will Chatto Cloud at some point in the future have to perform age verification? I have no idea, and I sincerely hope it doesn’t.

But here’s the thing: this here is one of the major reasons why I’m designing Chatto around a sea of separate instances, instead of running one large mega community instance for everyone (I have more things to say about this, but will leave that to a separate blog post.) If push comes to shove, and Chatto Cloud needs to start doing things you don’t agree with, you can always take your instance off Chatto Cloud and move it to your own server. (For reasons that should be obvious I hope that this will never need to happen. I have a family to feed!)

Chatto is cool, how can I help?

Awww, thank you! As of today, the best thing you can do is to hop over and join us on the Community instance to hang out, report bugs, and give feedback. Happy to have you there!