The lightweight, open chat protocol
a chat protocol made to be simple and easy to implement and understand. It is free to use, develop, and host for anyone, and already has a range of clients available too.
Lichat was designed for small to medium-sized communities, and features an extensible and practical protocol. If you're interested in more technical comparisons, please the section below.
Lichat supports browser-embedded clients. You can give it a try right here and chat with other interested people!
Both servers for open, unregistered access, and servers for controlled, safe environments, are possible. With the ex-lichat server, you can also host your own on any computer you have access to!
The lichat protocol is an open standard and all official software made for it is published under the libre zlib license. You can read the core specification here and the Shirakumo extensions here. All protocol parts also come with machine-readable specs to allow automatically generating protocol classes.
In addition to the above software, a number of client protocol implementation libraries are also available to write bots or new clients with:
This comparison is obviously biased and very reductive, but simply as a way to give you a quick idea of how Lichat stands compared to other options.
| Feature | Lichat | IRC | Matrix | Signal | XMPP | Discord |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Self-hostable | ||||||
| Open source | ||||||
| Guest access | ||||||
| Large chat rooms (100+ users) | ||||||
| Simple specification | ||||||
| Images, Videos, Music | ||||||
| VoIP/WebRTC Support | ||||||
| Offline history | ||||||
| Profile fields (avatars, etc) | ||||||
| End-to-End Encryption | ||||||
| Sharding | ||||||
| Federation | ||||||
| Bridging with other services | ||||||
| Support for bots/automated accounts | ||||||
| Sexy parentheses |