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Work · alternatives · 2026

FC

24 alternatives to Falcon – Chat-first communities built on Bluesky AT Protocol

I’m building a chat-first community app that uses Bluesky’s AT Protocol for identity. Current architecture: - Electron client - Spring Boot backend (monolith) - REST for servers/channels - Planning WebSocket-based messaging As a solo builder, I’m trying to balance simplicity with future scalability. At what point would you introduce: - a separate WebSocket gateway - pub/sub (Redis, etc.) - or keep everything in one Spring app until it breaks? Curious how others approached real-time chat systems early on. Project for context:…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

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    I spent the last few days building out a nicer ChatGPT-like interface to use Mistral 7B and Llama 3 fully within a browser (no deps and installs). I’ve used the WebLLM project by MLC AI for a while to interact with LLMs in the browser when handling sensitive data but I found their UI quite lacking for serious use so I built a much better interface around WebLLM. I’ve been using it as a therapist and coach. And it’s wonderful knowing that my personal information never leaves my local computer. Should work on Desktop with Chrome or Edge. Other browsers are adding WebGPU support as well - see…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3IB

    Hi HN, I built this out of frustration of the evergrowing list of AI models and features to try and to fit my workflow. The visual approach clicks for me so i went with it, it provides more freedom and control of the outcome, because predictable results and increased productivity is what I’m after when using conversational AI. The app is packed with features, my most used are prompt library, voice input and text search, narration is useful too. The app is local-first and works right in the browser, no sign up needed and it's absolutely free to try. BYOAK – bring your own API Keys. Let me…

    2024 · grafychat.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4
    Jan▲329

    Open-source ChatGPT alternative that runs 100% offline

    2024 · jan.ai · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Hey HN, Staff Engineer at Ably here. Over the past few months I've been speaking to engineers building AI assistants, copilots, and agentic workflows (over 40 companies at this point), with particular focus on cloud-hosted agents. I expected the hard problems to be in model selection, prompt engineering, and orchestration. Instead, the same infrastructure challenges kept coming up: realtime sync between agents and end clients is surprisingly painful to get right. - Managing and scaling WebSocket or SSE connections between agents and clients - Buffering messages server-side and implementing…

    Apr 2026 · ably.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Hi HN, A few of our team members at Airbyte (and Joe, who killed it!) recently played with building our own internal support chat bot, using Airbyte, Langchain, Pinecone and OpenAI, that would answer any questions we ask when developing a new connector on Airbyte. As we prototyped it, we realized that it could be applied for many other use cases and sources of data, so... we created a tutorial that other community members can leverage [http://airbyte.com/tutorials/chat-with-your-data-using-opena...] and the Github repo to run it…

    2023 · airbyte.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Your own open source Slack-like chat

    2015 · rocket.chat · its alternatives →

  8. 8IB

    I’ve been messing around with Bluesky for a while, and one thing I really missed was a proper way to browse discussions in a structured, Reddit-like way specially myself being daily reddit user. So, I ended up building a Reddit-like client for Bluesky that scratches that itch: Threadsky.app It pulls in trending topics, lets you explore conversations with a threaded view (so no more getting lost in replies), and even allows users to create channels with customizations, basically, like subreddits but on Bluesky. That said, this is still pretty barebones, and there’s a lot to improve. I really…

    2025 · threadsky.app · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Contribute to staab/git-chat development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2016 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    A small alternative to Slack

    2017 · totaljs.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11
    Bluesky▲172

    Building a Social Internet

    2023 · bsky.app · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Client library for Minimal Chat. Contribute to minimalchat/client development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2017 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13BA

    It works on top of the open-source workflow engine windmill [1] that you can easily self-host on a tiny server or a large k8s cluster. You will also need pgvector (here hosted on supabase) and of course a GPT4 api key. It showcases an approval step so that you only provide answers you are confident giving to your users, which feels less robotic. All the building blocks are scripts that you can reuse outside of windmill and you could build this in any other workflow engines (although less conveniently). We use it for our own needs on discord [2] and thoughts this was a common need for any…

    2023 · windmill.dev · its alternatives →

  14. 14AB
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    Author here. I wanted to keep my conversation with #Gemini about code handy while discussing something creative with #ChatGPT and using #DeepSeek in another window. I think it's a waste to have Electron apps and so wanted to chat with LLMs on my own terms. When I discovered the llm CLI tool I really wanted to have convenient and pretty looking access to my conversations, and so I wrote gtk-llm-chat - a plugin for llm that provides an applet and a simple window to interact with LLM models. Make sure you've configure llm first (https://llm.datasette.io/en/stable/) I'd…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Hello HN. I’d like to start by saying that I am a developer who started this research project to challenge myself. I know standard protocols like MCP exist, but I wanted to explore a different path and have some fun creating a communication layer tailored specifically for desktop applications. The project is designed to handle communication between desktop apps in an agentic manner, so the focus is strictly on this IPC layer (forget about HTTP API calls). At the heart of RAIL (Remote Agent Invocation Layer) are two fundamental concepts. The names might sound scary, but remember this is a…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    We’re building Poppin — a browser extension that turns any webpage into a shared social space. Users can chat in real-time, leave post, or host voice spaces with their communities on any URL. It’s like turning the internet into a live Twitch stream or Reddit communities — for every url of the web without requiring integration. Currently, we’re in invite-only beta and collecting feedback from early users. Try it out and let us know what feels smooth, what feels broken, and what you’d want more of. Intro Video: https://x.com/poppin_so/status/1843651417783054776 Request…

    2025 · poppin.so · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Hey HN, what I wanted to build here is a proper universal layer for persisted agentic sessions, that could be seamlessly interacted both via web and a messenger (Telegram). I really like what's done so far and would be nice to hear some feedback from you. The interesting thing is that I started to use Chatcode during its development as soon it was possible, so used this tool to build itself. I know that there could be trust/privacy concerns, because it relies on a gateway that you need to install on your machine in order to work, but: 1. You can use it on any machine, just have some…

    Jun 2026 · chatcode.dev · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    This weekend I finally shipped Gryt, a project I’ve been building since 2022 — an open-source, self-hostable Discord-style app focused on reliable voice chat + text. I’m the creator. I started it after getting fed up with Discord disconnects/paywalls and wanted something self-hosted and auditable. I started on this in 2022 and had an early proof-of-concept working back then (auth + friends list), but I quickly realized WebRTC voice isn’t something you can duct-tape together. I spent a big chunk of the next couple years learning the stack (ICE/DTLS-SRTP, NAT traversal, SFU design),…

    Feb 2026 · gryt.chat · its alternatives →

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    Hi HN! Few months ago I've shared a new kind of markdown editor that we (a team of three from the Czech Republic) have been working on (HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46144801). What resonated with folks the most was Kraa's unique ‘real-real-time’ chat feature. We have now acted on this feedback, improved the chat features, and made what we call Kraa Trees. Trees allow anyone to create a light-weight community / chat channels. It would be a stretch to call it an alternative to Discord, yet, but we hope that the frictionless nature of Trees will make them…

    Apr 2026 · kraa.io · its alternatives →

  21. 21SR
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    Build a decentralized web chat in 15 minutes. Contribute to chr15m/build-decentralized-web-app development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    A serverless chat backend - built on Firebase Cloud Functions - abiglobalhealth/chatfireServerless

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Hi everyone! I’m Arvid, cofounder of Anysphere (https://anysphere.co). With my two friends Sualeh and Shengtong I have been spending the last few months building a dedicated home for important, long-form conversations. We’re super excited to let the HN community test it out! We think that no existing platform for point–to-point communication prioritizes the conversations that you actually care about and that really matter. Instant messaging is filled with careless texts and stickers, email is filled with receipts and spammers, and physical mail, while better in those respects, is…

    2022 · gist.github.com · its alternatives →

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