← Back to context

Comment by 0xbadcafebee

7 hours ago

Matrix seems like a decent enough open protocol for a Slack replacement, with XMPP/IRC/IRCv3 being more useful for bare-bones chat transport.

This Chatto thing unfortunately uses a Protobuf custom API and is explicitly anti-compatibility with other systems. The lack of interoperability may end up killing it, unless the experience is much better than everything else.

I think time will tell, but one of the main things I like about Chatto is just how fast everything feels, and the protocol design is a good part of that I think. Data on the wire is just very small and optimized (last I checked, I didn't look at the latest protocol iteration yet). It was already very fast with the older GraphQL based API but now it's even quicker. With Slack and Discord, every channel switch and scrolls take visible time.

Oh, and the protobuf based realtime endpoint should make it very easy to build bridges, too.