Chitchatter

_{Logo provided by @ramyashreeshetty}

Chitchatter is a free (as in both price and freedom) communication tool. It is designed with security and privacy in mind. To that end, it is:

• Fully open source (licensed under GPL v2)
• Peer-to-peer
  • Whenever possible, otherwise Open Relay is used to ensure reliable peer connection
• Encrypted (via WebRTC)
• Serverless
  • Public WebTorrent servers are only used for initial peer handshake
• Ephemeral
  • Message content is never persisted to disk
• Decentralized
  • There is no API server. All that's required for Chitchatter to function is availability of GitHub for static assets and public WebTorrent and STUN/TURN relay servers for establishing peer communication.
• Self-hostable

Chitchatter was bootstrapped with Create React App. The secure networking magic would not be possible without Trystero.

How to use it

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 securely 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 whoever you wish to communicate with via a secure medium of your choosing (such as Burner Note or Yopass). Your static user name will be presented to you, and it would be good share that with who you will be chatting with so they know they're talking to you.

Features

• Multiple peers per room (limited only by the number of peer connections your browser supports).
• Public and private rooms
• Video and audio chatting
• Screen sharing
• Markdown support via react-markdown.
  • Includes support for syntax highlighting of code.
• Conversation backfilling from peers when a new participant joins
• Multiline message support (hold Shift and press Enter).
• Dark and light themes

Anti-features

• Messages are never persisted to disk. When you leave a peer room, messages are cleared from memory and cannot be retrieved.
• Chitchatter is an entirely client-side communication app. It uses public WebTorrent servers to establish peer connections and STUN/TURN relay servers when direct peer-to-peer connections cannot be established, but there is no Chitchatter API server.
• No analytics, tracking, or telemetry.
• This is a community-driven and unfunded project that makes no money. The users come first and there are no corporate or financial interests.

Why another chat app?

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 concerns by not having a central service operator and never storing communication data. Some services are required to establish a connection between peers, but the app relies on direct peer-to-peer communication as much as possible. Any services that are used by the app have no association with Chitchatter project and are publicly available for all to use.

Chitchatter is inspired by Cryptocat and Tox.

Veracity

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       185.199.108.153

To examine the static assets that are served to end users, you can audit the gh-pages branch.

Project status

Chitchatter is in MVP state. A lot of basic features and UX polish are missing, but much is planned for the future.

Chitchatter is an open source project, so community contributions and support are welcome! If there's something you'd like to see changed in the project, please open an issue or Pull Request on GitHub and share your ideas.

Project roadmap

This is a non-exhaustive list of things that are in Chitchatter's future:

• File sharing
• Indicators for when others are typing

See the full ticket backlog here.

Environments

• Production environment: https://chitchatter.im/
  • Mirror: https://chitchatter.vercel.app/ (note that peers cannot connect across domains)
• Staging: https://chitchatter-git-develop-jeremyckahn.vercel.app/

Available Scripts

In the project directory, you can run:

npm dev

Runs the entire stack (client + WebTorrent tracker) locally.

npm start

Runs 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 test

Launches the test runner in the interactive watch mode. See the section about running tests for more information.

npm run build

Builds 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.

Self-hosting

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.

Necessary steps after forking

Assuming you are hosting Chitchatter on GitHub Pages:

1. Change the 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/.
2. Define a 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.

Deployment

On GitHub

When hosted on GitHub Pages and the configuration above has been done, the Production environment is updated when the remote main branch is updated.

On non-GitHub hosts

Build the app with npm run build, and then serve the build directory. Any static file serving solution should work.

Runtime configuration

Explore the files in src/config to modify pairing and relay server configuration.

Troubleshooting

Peers won't connect

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.

Firefox-specific

Per #36, check your about:config settings and ensure that media.peerconnection.enabled is enabled.

⚠️ Disclaimer

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.