MWIN (My Witty Interactive Nonsense): A simple, self-hosted, terminal-based chat room application written in Go. No installation required, just download and run! Multiple users can join and participate in the chat room simultaneously. Users can choose their own name or use the default. Self contained, has no dependencies.
Devzat is a custom SSH server that takes you to a chat instead of a shell prompt. Because there's SSH apps on all platforms (even on phones) you can connect to Devzat on any device!
Supports commands, rooms (channels?), Markdown formatting, private messages, and pseudo-shell commands.
Webxdc brings web apps to messenger chats, in a simple file format containing HTML5, CSS, JavaScript and other asset files. All authentication, identity management, social discovery and message transport is outsourced to the host messenger which runs a webxdc app container file and relays application update messages between app users, letting each app inherit offline-first and end-to-end encryption capabilities implemented by the hosting messenger.
Directory of apps: https://webxdc.org/apps/
I don't know if any of these could be used in a free-standing way or not, but it might be interesting to try.
Your AI second brain. A copilot to search and chat (using RAG) with your knowledge base (pdf, markdown, org). Use powerful, online (e.g gpt4) or private, offline (e.g mistral) LLMs. Self-host locally or have it always accessible on the cloud. Access from Obsidian, Emacs, Desktop app, Web or Whatsapp
Khoj is an AI application to search and chat with your notes and documents. It is open-source, self-hostable and accessible on Desktop, Emacs, Obsidian, Web and Whatsapp. It works with pdf, markdown, org-mode, notion files and github repositories. It can paint, search the internet and understand speech.
Poezio is a free console XMPP client (the protocol on which the Jabber IM network is built). Its goal is to let you connect very easily (no account creation needed) to the network and join various chatrooms, immediately. It tries to look like the most famous IRC clients (weechat, irssi, etc). Many commands are identical and you won't be lost if you already know these clients. Configuration can be made in a configuration file or directly from the client. You'll find the light, fast, geeky and anonymous spirit of IRC while using a powerful, standard and open protocol.
Says it can even be used without an account. Maybe link-layer chat via mDNS?
Tinfoil Chat (TFC) is a FOSS+FHD peer-to-peer messaging system that relies on high assurance hardware architecture to protect users from passive collection, MITM attacks and most importantly, remote key exfiltration. TFC is designed for people with one of the most complex threat models: Organized crime groups and nation state hackers who bypass end-to-end encryption of traditional secure messaging apps by hacking the endpoint.
TFC uses XChaCha20-Poly1305 end-to-end encryption with deniable authentication to protect all messages and files sent to individual recipients and groups. The symmetric keys are either pre-shared, or exchanged using X448, the base-10 fingerprints of which are verified via an out-of-band channel. TFC provides per-message forward secrecy with BLAKE2b based hash ratchet. All persistent user data is encrypted locally using XChaCha20-Poly1305, the key of which is derived from password and salt using Argon2id, the parameters of which are automatically tuned according to best practices. Key generation of TFC relies on Linux kernel's getrandom(), a syscall for its ChaCha20 based CSPRNG.
VeilidChat is a chat application written for the Veilid distributed application platform. It has a familiar and simple interface and is designed for private, and secure person-to-person communications.
Requires a local clone of the Veilid source code to compile.
For more information about VeilidChat: https://veilid.chat/
Quiet is an alternative to team chat apps like Slack, Discord, and Element that does not require trusting a central server or running one's own. In Quiet, all data syncs directly between a team's devices over Tor with no server required.
Quiet is written (mostly) in TypeScript, with Electron and React Native frontends.
While apps like Slack, Discord, and Signal use central servers, Quiet syncs messages directly between a team's devices, over Tor, with no server required.
Each group of people (Quiet calls them "communities") gets their own insular network, so that data from one community never touches the devices of Quiet users in other communities. Not even in encrypted form!
Message syncing is taken care of by a project called OrbitDB, which works like a mashup of Git, a gossip protocol, and BitTorrent; it broadcasts new messages, syncs the latest messages, and fetches files. Syncing means that users typically receive all messages sent while they were offline.
This is a free communication tool that is designed for simplicity, privacy, and security. All interaction between you and your online peers is encrypted. There is no record of your conversation once you all leave.
Serverless, decentralized, ephemeral. Peer to peer whenever possible. Explicitly designed to be self-hostable. Public and private rooms. Audio and video chat. File transfer.
Miniature, self-hosted chat server.
Harmony’s protocol is designed to be as straightforward and pragmatic as possible. We do not make attempts at creating a “universal” design philosophy which the entire protocol is forced to follow, instead implementing things that make sense as a single cohesive system. Time has proven over time over that design idealism is often a limiting factor in services. Aims to be lightweight and somewhat simple to both understand and develop for.
OnionComms is server configuration to host chat applications over Tor using onion services. Servers supported:
- Mumble
- Asterisk
- Prosody
- Ejabberd
- Ricochet
List of "only yours" cloud services for everyday needs.
User-first chat platform built with modern web technologies.
This organisation contains all of the relevant repositories for the Revolt platform.
A simple, personal chat program that runs on a single computer. No Internet, just you.
MultiChat was intended for folks that need to talk to the voices within them for one reason or another. Maybe you think better when you talk to yourself. Maybe you're a system and need to have a conversation externally. Maybe it's a handy tool for simulating social interactions ahead of time. Maybe you need a tool for roleplay, or want to write as though your characters were in a chat room. Maybe you just want to mess around. Whatever the reason, MultiChat was made to let you have that conversation.
Lightweight, no non-standard dependencies.
A fork of the Psi IM client which is actually maintained and updated. Rolling releases - as new features and fixes are added, new releases come out. Cross platform - I use it on my Linux desktops and my OSX machine for work and it's quite solid. The configuration menus are a little tricky and hard to navigate, so you'll have to go through them a couple of times before you get things set up the way you want them. Customizable - themes, fonts, et al can be tweaked. Also has a plugin system so you can install add-ons.
An open source XMPP client for Android. Supports OMEMO. Supports multiple accounts simultaneously. Uses your Google Contacts to store its contact information. Available in both the Google Play store and F-Droid.
Take control over your live stream video by running it yourself. Streaming and chat right out of the box. In general Owncast is compatible with any software that uses RTMP to broadcast to a remote server.
Self-hosted alternative to Twitch.
A multi-account Matrix client that allows you to authorize webapps to access parts of your account, designed with collaboration in mind.
A web-based admin control panel for a Matrix server. Lots of webshit involved.
- git clone https://github.com/Awesome-Technologies/synapse-admin
- cd synapse-admin/
- yarn install
- yarn build
Then tar up build/, upload it to your server, unpack it, and give it a try.