Lichat was designed to be simple enough to implement in an afternoon, yet capable enough to power a real community. Through its extension system it supports:
Fix typos after sending, keep threads flowing with replies.
Upload custom emotes and use them in messages or as reactions.
Share images, videos, music, and files with each other.
Keep things cool with shadow bans, timeouts, flood protection, and more.
Search across channel history, fetch past messages from any client.
Control how and when you're notified. Keep your life calm and quiet.
Customise your look with avatars, bios, links, and custom profile fields.
Nest channels, set titles, icons, descriptions, rules, and news.
Adopt other names for role-playing or server bridging.
Ensure messages actually come from who you think they do with cryptographic signing.
Lichat supports browser-embedded clients. You can give it a try right here and chat with other interested people!
A number of programs already exist for Lichat, all available completely for free, forever, with open source and open licensing to do with what you like.
A full-featured browser client with all the goodies mentioned above.
View Lichat-JS
A native Android client that supports most extensions.
View Ocelot
A plugin for the Weechat IRC client, providing a terminal interface to Lichat.
View Weelichat
A scalable Elixir server supporting all of the current protocol extensions and more.
View ExLichatThe Lichat protocol is an open standard and all official software made for it is published under the libre zlib license. You can access the core specification and the Shirakumo extensions on this site.
If you're interested in working on or with Lichat, feel free to chat with other interested folks in the shirakumo channel on chat.shirakumo.org.
This comparison is obviously biased and very reductive, and is simply meant to give you a quick idea of how Lichat fares compared to other options.
| Feature | Lichat | IRC | Matrix | Signal | XMPP | Discord |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| Open source | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Guest access | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | No |
| Large chat rooms (100+ users) | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Simple specification | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| Images, Videos, Music | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| VoIP/WebRTC Support | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Offline history | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Profile fields (avatars, etc) | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| End-to-End Encryption | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Sharding | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Federation | No | No | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| Bridging with other services | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| Support for bots/automated accounts | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Sexy parentheses | Yes | No | No | No | No | No |
We'd really like to support VOIP/video conferencing soon. If you're knowledgeable in those kindsa technologies, please get in touch!
