The mission page for gram, as someone unfamiliar with it until this thread, is genuinely a thing of beauty.

Geany is quite a nice, simple editor. Very lightweight, open-source, and no AI.

If someone want to use such an app, it’s preferable to show an FOSS alternative that does it better

I think it’d be better to instead discourage the use of such apps instead of trying to shift them toward a vibe-coded app that happens to be open-source. It is not somehow less harmful or more ideal if someone’s computer is borked with an open-source app instead of a closed-source app. The less harmful scenario is not to use them at all, and that’s an easy stance to advocate for.

I personally don’t think this application brings anything useful to the table, and in fact is more of a liability than a help, as we see popping up in the issues page.

I would not recommend anyone use this, despite your test not resulting in anything catastrophic. Others have had negative outcomes, and that needs to be weighed against your neutral outcome.

Appears to be heavily vibe-coded based on the initial 1.0 commit release page saying it was co-authored by Claude Opus 4.6.

A crosspost got a comment that showed it’s basically 50% Claude commits.

I can’t imagine trusting a 4 month old AI-made project making adjustments to core parts of my system. And based on the issues page, it is liable to cause potentially severe issues.

On a platform that doesn’t allow ad-blockers, I’m guessing?

Movim has been developed since 2011 (Chatto began development 8 months ago, in comparison) and is based on XMPP, which is battle tested and proven to scale. It has a codebase that is maintainable long-term.

I personally would not trust an almost entirely vibe-coded app using tools prone to hallucination to be secure and properly implement encryption. But if others don’t have those concerns, then by all means.

Based on their contributing page, Chatto appears to be heavily vibe coded, with them actively encouraging any other contributors to use AI. That gets a hard pass from me.

Movim is a federated chat platform that recently implemented most of Discord’s features. It’s a little rough in the UX department, but it’s pretty much all there, and it isn’t vibe-coded like this chatto app is.

Thanks for mentioning harper, hadn’t heard of it until now.

It took me a bit to figure out how to make a call (definitely bad UX). What got it working for me was adding the other user as a contact (beyond just messaging them, it’s like a different thing), and then making sure they also added me as contact, and each person accepted that contact request, then the call button seemed to show up, and the call worked fine, even video.

Movim in particular is the most suited for a discord replacement in the XMPP space, as the dev implemented discord-like channels with rooms. It also has group video calls and screensharing with audio (must use a chromium browser for now to share the audio).

It is still clunky compared to Discord, but that generally applies to most of the alternatives 😅

Matrix has a lot of problems, some of them inherent to its design, including leaking metadata of encrypted messages to any server that participates in a chat room (this metadata includes the time the message was sent, size, sender and recipients of messages).

I personally think Movim is the better option that’s actively federated, while Fluxer is also promising if it successfully implements federation as well.

You could use the GPU to help host a peertube instance.

For XMPP, the Movim client is currently the best option as a discord alternative.

It has group voice and video calls, screensharing w/audio (need a chromium browser to share the audio for now), and just added discord-like channels with rooms (though it’s not as smooth as Discord). The Dev plans to implement drop-in voice rooms at some point as well.

I’m sure there’ll be lots of bugs and I don’t think it will scale well.

The lack of scaling and even more critically, lack of federation, unfortunately makes this not a viable alternative, at least not for Discord as it is used today. As a smaller self-hosted option that is just for use between a friend group, it’d probably be fine. It just won’t be able to replace the exact use-case of Discord, such as allowing for easily bringing new randos you meet into a call without them having to sign up to your specific server.

The Discord-alternative landscape is filled with people vying to take its place, but I think we would be better served rallying behind Movim and XMPP, IMHO. Or Fluxer, if they eventually can enable federation.

I think it’d be better if we stuck with Movim instead, which is already built on a proven scalable and most importantly federated back-end (XMPP), and also already offers text, group audio and video calls, screensharing w/ audio (have to use chromium based browser for now to stream the audio), and even some pretty decent encryption.

It’s our most promising Discord alternative out of many.

Whether or not XMPP is a Signal or a Discord replacement is dependant on the client.

For a Discord replacement, there is the Movim XMPP client, which has group audio/video calls, screensharing (w/audio using chromium based browser), support for gifs and videos within the chat, and very soon Discord-like servers with rooms, after which the dev plans to work on drop-in voice chat rooms.

I tried a lot, I think it has the most feature parity.

Have you tried Movim? It has most of the essential features, like group video calls, screen sharing, and a better E2EE method than matrix (IMO, anyway). It’s also much easier to set up and host since it uses XMPP.

I’ve personally used 4 encrypted communication apps, here are my thoughts:

Signal: huge downside that it required a phone number (not sure if it still does), and the centralized nature of it makes me very wary of it. It worked reliably when I did use it, but I no longer use it.

Matrix with Element: As others mentioned, it leaks meta data. It wasn’t very reliable in my experience with encrypted group chats. Messages would constantly not be readable by other users in the chat, requiring frequent re-sending to finally get through. Overall I found it very frustrating to use.

XMPP: Experience can somewhat vary depending on the app used. With the Movim desktop front-end, I can sometimes have issues with encrypted messages not getting unencrypted (possibly just user error on my part), but with mobile apps like Conversations or Monocles, its been pretty much 100% reliable. Doesn’t drain my battery either. Would recommend.

Deltachat: I’ve used this the least, but I really like it. Super easy to connect to friends and join a group chat, its all encrypted by default so no real chance of encountering an unencrypted message, very nice UI, is available on all platforms as one app, and has been 100% reliable with low battery drain. Highly recommend if you don’t need to make voice calls (it can do texts, images, and supports voice/video files you can send and play within the app).