Chat App

Before the dark days of the cancerous spread, the internet was a relatively interesting place run entirely on passion.

What happened to hosting our own communities anyway? And why is it we've settled on Matrix of all things? It's horrible.

The Idea

The chat app draws its inspiration from IRC and XMPP, while I'm modeling the clients on Discord.

The idea is to create a simple application that lets people communicate via addresses similar to email addresses, and to join multi-user chat channels and the like.

A lot of the tough bits are in the planning, not the execution. Little things like 'how do we format user addresses vs room addresses', how do we federate all home servers together efficiently, and how do we handle sharing of media in a way that doesn't require super advanced concepts?

It's a WIP. I'm desperate for help. But I know that I'll have to do the basics before anyone puts their hand up.

It's slow going because I started a new job when I started working on it.

As of Aug 2026, I've only really just started taking time to sit down with it.