Item — HN Reader

The killer feature of Discord for me is being able to jump between communities without logging in to each of them. Open source alternatives never provide that. Does this one?

Matrix is the obvious exception but the UX has always been terrible for me. I don't need e2ee for group messages and it brings too much complexity with it.

4 comments

Looking at the screenshot, it seems to be the case, with servers at the left like on Discord.

Another alternative that does have it would be https://fluxer.app.

But tbf, both face the same issue: those communities that you want to switch between need to exist. :/ (But of course not an issue if you're the one creating them and you have users who are down to join them.)

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.)

Then wouldn't servers need to trust each other? Otherwise I could use my server to log into any other server.

> I don't need e2ee for group messages and it brings too much complexity with it.

E2EE is not mandatory and public rooms don't usually use it.

You pay for most of the complexity whether you use the feature or not.

felt the same way so I've built one for myself that I've been using with friends and family - not (yet) open source but self-hostable https://github.com/bogpad/meepachat