Chitchatter
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A peer-to-peer chat app that is serverless, decentralized, and ephemeral.
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Logo provided by @ramyashreeshetty
Chitchatter is a free (as in both price and freedom) communication tool. It is designed to be the simplest way to connect with others privately and securely. It is:
Chitchatter uses the Create React App tool chain. The secure networking and streaming magic would not be possible without Trystero.
Open https://chitchatter.im/ and join a room to start chatting with anyone else who is in the room. By default, room names are random UUIDs that are generated client-side. To privately communicate with someone, it is recommended to join one of these randomly-generated rooms and share the URL (via the "🔗" button at the top of the page) to whomever you wish to communicate with via a secure medium of your choosing (such as Burner Note or Yopass). Your user name will be presented to you, and it would be good to share that with who you will be chatting with beforehand so they know they're talking to you.
react-markdown.There is no shortage of user-friendly chat apps available, but most of them rely on a central service to facilitate communication. It is difficult to trust these central services, as commercial interests and government pressure can compel service operators to work against the best interest of the users. Even when when user data is handled in good faith by service operators, the possibility remains that encrypted data held at rest may be decrypted against the user's will.
Chitchatter designs around these risks with web meshes. There is no central service operator that stores or potentially mishandles communication data. Some services are required to establish an initial connection between peers, but the app uses direct peer-to-peer communication as much as possible. Any services that are used by the app have no association with the Chitchatter project and are publicly available for all to use.
Chitchatter offers a private and secure solution for:
The core of Chitchatter's security model is the fact that it is fully open source. You are free (and encouraged) to fully audit the project source code and infrastructure. Not only is the source code available under the terms of the GPL, but all build logs are publicly accessible as well.
If you would like to verify that the app hosted at https://chitchatter.im/ is the one that is hosted on GitHub, you can use dig:
$ dig chitchatter.im
; <<>> DiG 9.18.1-1ubuntu1.1-Ubuntu <<>> chitchatter.im
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 61332
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 5, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 65494
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;chitchatter.im. IN A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
chitchatter.im. 231 IN CNAME jeremyckahn.github.io.
jeremyckahn.github.io. 231 IN A 185.199.111.153
jeremyckahn.github.io. 231 IN A 185.199.110.153
jeremyckahn.github.io. 231 IN A 185.199.109.153
jeremyckahn.github.io. 231 IN A 185.199.108.153To examine the static assets that are served to end users, you can audit the gh-pages branch.
See the full ticket backlog here.
In the project directory, you can run:
npm devRuns the entire stack (client + WebTorrent tracker) locally.
npm startRuns the front end app in the development mode. Uses public WebTorrent trackers.\ Open http://localhost:3000 to view it in your browser.
The page will reload when you make changes. You may also see any lint errors in the console.
npm testLaunches the test runner in the interactive watch mode. See the section about running tests for more information.
npm run buildBuilds the app for production to the build folder. It correctly bundles React in production mode and optimizes the build for the best performance.
The build is minified and the filenames include the hashes.
Chitchatter is designed to be forked and self-hosted. If you would like to change pairing or relay server configuration, or you simply prefer to control your own builds and versions, just fork this repo and follow the steps below.
Assuming you are hosting Chitchatter on GitHub Pages:
homepage property in package.json to whatever URL your Chitchatter instance will be hosted from. This will be something like https://github_user_or_org_name.github.io/chitchatter/.DEPLOY_KEY GitHub Action secret (at https://github.com/github_user_or_org_name/chitchatter/settings/secrets/actions). See the docs for peaceiris/actions-gh-pages for more information.When hosted on GitHub Pages and the configuration above has been done, the Production environment is updated when the remote main branch is updated.
Build the app with npm run build, and then serve the build directory. Any static file serving solution should work provided it is using a secure context.
Explore the files in src/config to modify pairing and relay server configuration.
This could happen for a variety of reasons. The most likely of which is that one or more peers cannot connect directly and must use the configured STUN/TURN relay as a fallback. The standard relay (https://www.metered.ca/tools/openrelay/) does not guarantee uptime, so it may simply be unavailable for some time. There's not much to do other than wait until it becomes available again.
Per #36, check your about:config settings and ensure that media.peerconnection.enabled is enabled.
By using Chitchatter, you agree to accept full responsibility for your actions related to its use. Additionally, you agree not to hold any contributors to the Chitchatter project responsible for any result of your use of it. The developers of Chitchatter do not endorse illegal activity and provide the software strictly for the purposes of lawful use.
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