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Comment by wxw | Hacker News Reader

> It’s designed to be extremely easy to self-host on your own infrastructure.

Kudos for this. Per the docs: https://docs.chatto.run/,

> Chatto ships in a compact, self-contained binary

> it uses NATS, a compact message broker that also ships with a built-in stream persistence engine [...] NATS is just as easy to provision as Chatto, and most of our examples will show you how.

> you can also configure an external S3-compatible object storage for Chatto to store your files in, and we strongly recommend doing so...

> The actual calls are powered by LiveKit (Apache-2.0), which you need to deploy alongside Chatto. As with NATS, the deployment examples show the required wiring.

> ...

And kudos for backing it up with real guidance. Great project.

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Wow, it's using NATS! I used NATS extensively 10+ years ago, and I'm happy to hear it's still around. Our infrastructure had hiccups across our fleet of machines, but one part that always remained up and running without complaining on some dinky machine was NATS. Well, that and Redis. No complaints ever.

We are building something B2B expected to have good enough scale ... we had to choose between kafka, nats, redpanda and rabbitMQ .... We went ahead with NATS .... don't know why, but, when we went through all the docs, including setup and operational, NATS just felt right.

We are in the same decision making stage and trying to choose between rabitMQ, Kafka, NATS and some solutions built on top of Redis.

Did NATS eventually worked well?

Excellent. We already tested at okayish scale of 5 million messages per minute, with each message being less than 1KiB. Do note that NATS can easily handle 100x this scale. It's just what we had tested during initial days.

Wow!

I have a stupid question - as I understand NATS works very well as a “message” pipe/bus. Anyway to get Redis type cache functionality as well ? Is it something possible ?

JetStream (not NATS) has a built-in key/value store. Relevant thread (old, from 2023): https://github.com/nats-io/nats.go/discussions/1507

someone did some benchmarks in 2025:

    nats bench kv put --size="128" --msgs 1000000 --storage file
    1m3s → Pub stats: 15,656 msgs/sec ~ 1.91 MB/sec
    
    nats bench kv get --size="128" --msgs 1000000
    59s → Sub stats: 16,720 msgs/sec ~ 2.04 MB/sec

I have personally not used this though.

Thank you! Jetstream looks useful. For a platform which is production our Redis costs are getting prohibitively high. I was on the look for alternatives and perhaps in the software reliability tool [0] I am buildin try out Jetstream.

[0] https://github.com/bobinson/vulture

Cool... "vulture" looks pretty good... especially more now-a-days. Thanks..

I also maintain these sites for npm related attacks (since there have been so many since past 1.5 years):

1. Techniques exploited: https://npm-supply-chain-attack-techniques.pagey.site/

2. Documented attacks: https://npm-supply-chain-attacks-25-26.pagey.site/

I’d also recommend looking at Swytch (docs.getswytch.com, particularly the economics page).

Disclosure: I’m a founder.

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.)

Inspired by Chatto, I also built some prototypes on the NATS (+Go) stack and it's been a dream. Feels like a severely under-hyped technology :D

This is super cool. More options is always good. Something that is confusing about the docs though... is there a desktop application? The screenshot implies there is but I couldn't find the docs to download THAT.

It's a first-class PWA currently but no native desktop apps yet.

Sounds like something I could finally build with Kotlin Multiplatform...

There is a Tauri wrapper that I built early on because I wanted the desktop convenience (autostart, separate app, etc) that Firefox+PWA couldn't offer, I use the desktop version as my daily Chatto driver. The mobile build is more of a proof of concept for now. Check it out: https://github.com/teal-bauer/chatto-tauri

Hi, I'm making Chatto!

Chatto so far fully commits to providing a great PWA experience. The screenshot you're seeing is of the PWA.

I'm aware that a lot of people want desktop and mobile apps. These will be coming at some point, at least as wrappers around the PWA.

It's a really cool project and clearly you put a lot of effort behind it. I like that it's self-hosted and may try it out on my homelab. Thanks for making it!

Can it be installed on Cloudflare or Vercel or something else that is easy/cheap/free?

I run something similar with livekit, all on hetzner. its exceedingly affordable for a bunch of people at once to use it.

looks like a great project, want to get AI bots talking to each other

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