At-chat 1.0 is live!

[MartinS]

at-chat 1.0 is now live!

What is it?

An open source chat app similar to Discord written in Elm and Lamdera (with a bit of backend Rust and a bit of frontend JS). The first commit was in April 2025 and now, 17 months later, I think it’s ready for a 1.0 release!

If that sounds interesting, I have an Elm group set up, click here to join!

Disclaimer

AI assisted me with programming (I review the generated code). AI is not used for artwork or user readable text. This announcement is not AI written.

Features

• Video chat
  
  
• Discord integration*. You can link your Discord account and chat with people still on Discord.
• Designed for both desktop and mobile usage
• File/image attachments
• Markdown support
• Stickers and custom emojis
• Doodle Annotate on top of people’s messages
• Opt-in end-to-end encryption for direct messages
• In-app multiplayer games. Currently Go, Scrabble Word Spelling Game, and Sheep Game.
  
  
• Push notifications and email notifications
• Easily export your conversations as json

My vision for this

I want to build a space for friends and community members to hang out. Something we can feel like we have ownership over. Something that’s easy for anyone familiar with Elm to tweak or add very specific features** to that wouldn’t make sense for other apps with millions of users.

The goal is not to make something that makes money*** or has broad appeal. I don’t want to attract random internet users, I want friendly interesting people (this is to say, don’t link at-chat on Hacker News please).

If this sounds interesting, you’re welcome to join!

Thanks to the following people

@supermario for creating Lamdera and for assisting me (along with a lot of help from @miniBill) in setting up a custom server
@pit helping me test the Go boardgame
@lishaduck and @bdukes for bravely trying out the Discord integration and reporting + fixing bugs
And of course @evancz for creating Elm!

*Discord integration requires giving at-chat full access to your account (Discord doesn’t have any oauth system for this) and it probably violates their terms of service. Use at your own risk!

**As an example, at-chat properly renders ascii art inside of code blocks when the language is set to “ascii”. I added this because I like ascii art. If you too like ascii art, please join this group!

***I’ve designed at-chat so that it’s cheap to host. Currently €30/month which I can cover without any issue.

[paulh]

Really cool, nice.

FYI, when I clicked the first link in your post, it took me to at-chat.app. I then signed up and it took me to a page that said something like “select a guild then click on their profile to post a message” - there was nothing to select or click on.

I then clicked on your “click here to join” link, in this post and it took me here:

I had no way of getting here after signing up from your first link, but now I always get here. The Elm channel (I’m guessing that’s a guild in at-chat world) wasn’t shown after initial sign up.

Maybe I’m missing something obvious - I don’t do Discord - apologies if I am.

[MartinS]

Sorry about the confusing messaging. Maybe the “Join a guild and then click on someone’s profile image to start a chat!” could instead say “You don’t have any direct message channels yet (besides with yourself). Join a guild via an invite link and then click on someone’s profile image to start a direct message chat!”