
NovaChat: Multi-Network Chat - memexy
https://nova.chat/
======
stryan
I'm interested to see how they handle the Facebook messenger bridge since FB
seems to rather aggressive about the bridge from logging in.

I've been running Tulir's bridge [0] for a few months now and my Facebook
account gets locked out every week or so (requiring unlocking and a new
password).

EDIT: Looking at the code, they use Tulir's bridge as well. I'd be..cautious
about claming production level support with it due to the afore mentioned
logout issue. Which is a shame since all of Tulir's bridges are high quality.

The bridgebox repo appears to be a bunch of bridges in docker containers. I
wonder if it's really worth running the bridgebox and not a homeserver, versus
using matrix-docker-ansible-deploy [1]. You already need the VPS space.

[0]: [https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-
facebook](https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-facebook)

[1]: [https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-
deploy](https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy)

~~~
erohead
Ah well I make no claims to this being production level reliability. It's very
much beta software. Very beta :) For those who have the capability of setting
up a web server and configuring DNS, I would recommend using matrix-docker-
ansible and host it all yourself.

The bridgebox is actually designed to run on a raspberry pi, my plan is to
give each user a free Pi to run their bridgebox.

Send me a note on matrix, I'd love to chat! @eric:nova.chat

~~~
GekkePrutser
Just wanted to ask: I signed up for the beta but did I commit to anything? I
don't mind trying it out, but do we have to pay the $10 from the start and is
there a minimum term?

~~~
erohead
No commitment at all. You can try it out first.

~~~
GekkePrutser
Thanks!

One other Q: What about E2E security? Will you implement this for the comms
between the bridges and the browsers? As I understand it I would run the
bridges myself so it would make sense to have everything encrypted.

~~~
erohead
Yes there is encryption between your client and bridge.

------
lowmemcpu
> NovaChat is a paid app with a monthly fee of $10 (price may go up after beta
> period)

Wow $10/mo?! Pidgin was the multi-network chat tool, and was free! I'd
understand $10 one-time, but not per month. And the price may go up? No thanks

~~~
o-__-o
As an original contributor to pidgin when it was marko’s gaim, I am
flabbergasted at the state of open source chat today.

I wonder if libpurple just needs to be updated to support cloud
services/various chat apis. I’d be willing to bootstrap that project...

~~~
pabs3
There are already libpurple plugins for various chat systems, for example
Discord:

[https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-
discord/](https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-discord/)

~~~
pmlnr
There are many more.

Facebook MQTT: [https://github.com/dequis/purple-
facebook](https://github.com/dequis/purple-facebook)

Telegram: [https://github.com/majn/telegram-
purple](https://github.com/majn/telegram-purple)

Skype web:
[https://github.com/EionRobb/Skype4pidgin](https://github.com/EionRobb/Skype4pidgin)

Pidgin is a life saver.

------
danicgross
Between this, Mastodon, Matrix, and others, I feel like we're witnessing the
end of the centralized web era (everyone uses one network), and the return to
a distributed Internet (lots of different services) with aggregators (Adium or
NovaChat).

The recent Twitch/Reddit/Twitter bans should only magnify this effect.
Congrats Eric! I'm very excited to use this.

~~~
el_dev_hell
I hope that's the case, but I have trouble seeing a future where centralized
applications (mostly Facebook, Instagram, and iMessage) will be thrown aside
by the masses.

People still use Facebook after multiple proven privacy scandals. If that
doesn't push people off the platform, what will?

~~~
lozaning
An alternative with a strong existing network effect. I dont really use FB at
all anymore, but Im not on Mastodon et al because no one else I know is.

It's a bad catch 22.

~~~
peterburkimsher
BeWelcome.org is trying hard to get that "critical mass". I won't explain the
whole history of CouchSurfing demanding membership fees and locking people out
of accounts, because I don't want to complain. The focus within the community
is about volunteering and building a new future together. It's primarily about
letting people stay in each others' houses for free, yet there's more to the
community that just hosting and being a guest.

It's a very international group, with real-life weekly meetups in several
cities. The management structure is like Wikipedia/Wikimedia. The website
itself needs a lot of work though.

If BeWelcome gets the network effect it needs, I'm very hopeful that
BeVolunteer could start more projects. (BeBook? BeMail? BeChat?)

~~~
sixhobbits
It says its open source, but the only link to this in the faq says you should
"get access" to the source via some developers circle(?) which goes to an
apache "it works" page

~~~
peterburkimsher
Sorry that the link is wrong! This is the Github project:

[https://github.com/BeWelcome/rox](https://github.com/BeWelcome/rox)

There's no closed "developer's circle", it's an open group that anyone can
join - I just made an account about a month ago.

------
myu701
2 things.

1) much better name for a matrix client than the others, Nova sounds cool.

2) $10/month is more than Disney+ per month. Could there be the option to
accept a $5/month for desktop only and a separate $5/month for mobile? Then a
combined $10/month for both?

Massive kudos on it looking good (even if electron) and doing Matrix stuff
nicely.

I will be watching this closely, especially when Signal is ready to go.

~~~
erohead
If you don't want to pay, you can always spin up our entire system on your own
server. One way is to use Matrix-Docker-Ansible
[https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-
deploy](https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy) It is
finnicky though. If you promise to give me good feedback and bug reports, sign
up for the beta and I will waive the fee though!

~~~
figers
I'd be happy to provide that to waive the monthly fee, I just filled out your
form...

Would love to have iMessage working from my windows computer

------
GekkePrutser
Cool, I'm running a Matrix service like this myself but it's been a bit hit
and miss. Keeping all those different bridges running over time is difficult.
Especially the signal one is a real PITA, often contacts stop getting my
messages from matrix while I still get theirs.

And Whatsapp requires whatsapp web so you need to keep the client running on
your phone 24/7 _or_ run it in an Android VM which is pretty heavy.

And finally the whole Matrix experience is a bit lacking IMO. It doesn't
really do 1:1 chats so every time someone chats with you you get a 'room
invite' from the bridge, which you have to accept, and all those old rooms
stay forever cluttering up the system.

I wouldn't mind outsourcing all that work, but $10/month is a lot.. Good idea
though! There's definitely a need for this, which is why I've been looking
into it too. I'm just getting so sick of all these different chat apps
screaming for attention all day, each with their own difficulties. Some don't
work on the desktop, others only work on 1 client at a time. And each milking
as much data as they can. Why can't people just stick to IRC :)

~~~
cyphar
> Keeping all those different bridges running over time is difficult.

The issue is that most of the services Matrix tries to bridge to are basically
hostile entities (except IRC and Slack). I'm honestly shocked how _well_
Matrix bridging works when you take that into consideration -- and
unsurprisingly the Slack and IRC bridges are the nicest ones to use. But I
will admit that I think Matrix's marketing around bridging as being core to
their chat model is a bit of a stretch -- while all of the bridges do work,
most are a bit dodgy (and some require you to self-host).

For instance, the Signal bridge is actually a hacked-up version of the Signal
Chrome App with a bunch of hooks added so that they can simulate you doing
things through the web app. There is a project that uses libsignal-service-
java directly to create a more usable CLI and DBus interface[1], but
unfortunately they haven't switched to using that (and if it became widely
used, Moxie would probably decide to block it). Whatsapp is probably similarly
hacked-together.

> It doesn't really do 1:1 chats so every time someone chats with you you get
> a 'room invite' from the bridge, which you have to accept, and all those old
> rooms stay forever cluttering up the system.

Maybe this is bridge-specific, but I have several long-lived IRC 1:1 chats
that are all in one room. There's nothing stopping a bridge from doing this
correctly (as far as I know). As for old rooms cluttering up the system, I
believe that (non-joinable) rooms with no members get garbage collected but I
might be mistaken.

[1]: [https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli](https://github.com/AsamK/signal-
cli)

~~~
Nextgrid
I'm not sure I agree with it. The hostility of the services is one thing, but
regardless of that there's definitely a lack of UX around "tunneling" into
third-party accounts.

Most bridges require your own session on the third-party service (sometimes
provided by a session cookie in the config file) and then invite you to a
private room for each conversation through that service. There is no concept
of a login UI for a third-party service, nor is there a concept of "ghost"
users for third-party service users (let's say I have a friend that is both on
Matrix as well as IRC and Signal - I want him to be considered as a single
entity on the UI, and no need to have "rooms" for one-to-one chats with third-
party users.

~~~
GekkePrutser
Yes this is another issue. Each bridge has its own way of managing things. In
some (like Signal) you have to run a CLI command, in others you have like a
bot where you can tell it what to do. It's not really standardized in Matrix.

------
addajones
Trillian, Adium, Pigdin for 2020? Lol. What a mess the internet has become.

~~~
loceng
Those were all free too if I remember correctly?

~~~
coding123
Yes they were, except I think Trillian had a pro version.

~~~
addajones
I remember those! It was free forever then later on that Trillian Pro came
around. Adium was my favorite during that time.

------
rtomanek
> Eric Migicovsky

Is this the Eric of Pebble fame? I have a lot of warm feelings here, I
actually still wear one. :)

While I prefer open communication protocols and clients, the reality seems to
be the world has sadly moved on from this. Hopefully Nova will be of as high
quality as Pebble was.

Good luck!

------
stonogo
Closed-source, single-dev Matrix frontend that doesn't even mention MS Teams.
I want to like it, but for a monthly service fee it needs to be absolutely
flawless and it needs to have enterprise auth nailed -- including
O365/Exchange. I also can't figure out what this does that XMPP did not do --
XMPP did all of the above and still didn't really last.

~~~
erohead
it's (mostly) open source, actually:
[https://gitlab.com/nova](https://gitlab.com/nova)

------
admax88q
I was under the impression that WhatsApp pretty aggressively bans accounts
using third party clients.

How did you get around this? Or is it not an issue afterall?

~~~
0xCMP
Seems like they're running a chrome process controlled via the automation
APIs.

~~~
erohead
not exactly, we're using a library that reverse engineered the Whatsapp Web
api: [https://github.com/Rhymen/go-whatsapp](https://github.com/Rhymen/go-
whatsapp). I haven't had any problems with the API and I've been using it for
a year straight.

~~~
imrelaxed
Seems like your cloudflare got hugged a few hugs too many.

~~~
erohead
haha yeah, I did not expect this so I hadn't paid $5 for more workers. Should
work now :)

------
coding123
The target customer seems a bit odd. Typically people will have exactly 1 paid
service for chat. Like, probably Slack. And that's already $$ per month per
user. So is this for individuals that have their company pay for slack, and
then like, what also pay for the luxury chat client that let's the employee
add like a bunch of personal chat accounts?

On the other hand, if they're expecting individuals to pay for this (at $10/mo
and that's during beta) just like, because, that's going to be a challenging
market.

------
chrysoprace
Since it's just using the Matrix protocol; it should be easy enough to just
use bridgebox[0] with an existing Synapse server, right? Is the custom client
doing anything that deviates from the standard Matrix protocol?

[0]: [https://gitlab.com/nova/bridgebox](https://gitlab.com/nova/bridgebox)

------
usbfingers
I've built a not for profit multi-platform capable matrix chat client that is
now in open alpha called Syphon ([https://github.com/syphon-
org/syphon](https://github.com/syphon-org/syphon)) to largely address the
issue of proprietary chat clients.

Private, secure communication (with a decent brand and ui) should be
accessible to everyone by now. Signal does a great job of filling the void for
now but if they fail or are blocked by a country or community, the application
interface itself is not a protocol to which people could easily pivot to the
“gmail” of Signal.

I’m hoping that Riot’s upcoming rebrand will mark the start of this
transition. We needed centralized efforts to spread usage of matrix, or even a
similarly accessible protocol, but make it easy for those to create or
maintain their own connection to that network. If all else fails, I guess
we’ll have Syphon.

------
KishanBagaria
We're working on a similar idea at [https://texts.com](https://texts.com)

It supports iMessage as well, isn't based on Matrix and is completely local.

~~~
Arathorn
is not being based on Matrix a good thing? :D

~~~
KishanBagaria
:) Maybe? It has a new abstraction so it's kinda competing with Matrix as
well.

------
anthonyko
Been using this client for a few months and am pretty happy with it.

Have looked for a replacement for Adium for quite a while and Nova Chat is
looking like it will be it. So much relief from not having to juggle multiple
desktop chat clients and mobile notifications.

Looking forward to the upcoming features! App is getting some nice updates
every few weeks.

------
comex
This is _exactly_ the functionality I want from a chat client, and have been
unable to find.

But it’s Electron. Pass.

(Unless I find time to go figure out if it can be used with other Matrix
clients…)

~~~
erohead
(I made this) It works with any matrix client. But the UI naturally is not as
nice. I use it daily with RiotX on Android and it works fine.

~~~
RMPR
If the claim of GP is true that your app is electron, why mention this?

>NovaChat is not a browser/Chromium solution that opens many tabs to different
chat networks like Franz, Shift or Station

~~~
ChrisClark
Because it's not? It's an app built in Electron that talks to their server.
It's not an app built in Electron that opens up the official webpages for each
of these chat apps.

------
elchin
I remember using Trillian back in the day, and the problem was that they
couldn't keep up with features of each chat network, so I had go back to using
ICQ, MSN Messenger, etc. separately.

------
granitDev
I'm not sure why this is needed...looks to me like a solution in search of a
problem.

~~~
smt88
I could not disagree more. This is a probably for me almost every waking hour.
Perhaps this is a US-centric problem, but I have groups of friends on WhatsApp
(mostly foreign), Hangouts, MMS/SMS, Telegram, and Messenger. Then there's
Slack for work.

Ever since my Blackberry had my emails, SMS, and BBMs (iMessage-like service
for BlackBerry users) all in the same inbox with threads, I have been dying
for a service where I can just say, "I want to send a message to [person],"
and let the app decide how to contact them or continue my existing thread.

I have paid for Franz and Station, both of which were unusable garbage, and
now use Hamsket (a fork or Rambox)[1].

1\.
[https://github.com/TheGoddessInari/hamsket](https://github.com/TheGoddessInari/hamsket)

------
bovermyer
This is of interest to me, but the Electron thing worries me. I already commit
a lot of memory to Electron clients (VSCode, Discord, Slack, etc.). Adding
another one, even if it replaces Slack, makes me a little concerned for memory
economy.

~~~
adrusi
Sounds like once the discord support is available, it would actually _reduce_
the number of electron apps you're running.

------
rglullis
I've been running my own Matrix but I haven't really looked at the state of
the bridges. Does it allow, e.g, someone on whatsapp to make a video call with
me and I see it on Riot?

~~~
jeroenhd
Not as far as I am aware. Most proprietary chat apps have very little support
outside basic messaging. Corrections and standard reaction emoji work for
platforms that support it, but that's about as far as support goes in most
cases.

Video calling, especially e2ee direct communication, would probably be
unstable and if poor quality if you require the call to go through an extra
translation hop.

Chat support has been getting better though, bridge performance has increased
a lot over the past few months. If the web app for your bridge of choice
supports calling, I see no theoretical limitation in implementing a call
integration, though it would probably be very hard to get it working
correctly.

------
meddlin
While I'm sure it's a fine app, this oddly looks like a graduation of using
Thunderbird in ~2006 as a multi-email client.

------
brunoqc
10$ per month is a bit much for an app.

------
kutorio
NovaChat lists WeChat in the "Coming Soon" section. Out of curiosity is it
even possible to write a 3rd party client for WeChat? Last time I checked
their APIs are extremely limited.

------
c-smile
While we are on this page...

If someone need my help in creating native Chat UI please let me know, I can
help to do it with Sciter: [https://terrainformatica.com/2019/09/23/sciter-
chat/](https://terrainformatica.com/2019/09/23/sciter-chat/)

It could be purely native application or something along the lines of Sciter
Quark ( [https://quark.sciter.com](https://quark.sciter.com) )

~~~
UnnoTed
I'm making one, it wont be open-source but i'll respect privacy, allow free
self-hosting... imagine a discord(call features) + slack(paid for companies).

[https://imgur.com/uSA8AMs.png](https://imgur.com/uSA8AMs.png)
[https://imgur.com/P9ckNBn.png](https://imgur.com/P9ckNBn.png)
[https://imgur.com/L9fDMKQ.png](https://imgur.com/L9fDMKQ.png)

Ram usage is currently at 12-50mb on windows, up to 90mb with 50 messages with
images(unoptimized, no virtual scrolling yet).

The server will be a single binary, there is still a lot to do: pin messages,
emojis, avatars, community avatar, search... i want it (server+desktop) to be
done by the end of the year.

~~~
c-smile
If Sciter sounds interesting for the project, please contact me at
[https://sciter.com/contact_us/](https://sciter.com/contact_us/)

~~~
UnnoTed
It already uses Sciter

------
m12k
Can anyone comment on how this compares to Ferdi?

~~~
qmarchi
Ferdi is essentially a proxy into the browser version of the apps, but this
looks like it's built to proxy the connections to matrix, with a native front-
end.

------
koiz
Why are we repeating the past!

~~~
memexy
It's not repetition though. It's more like a spiral. I like modern chat apps
better. My parents and brother can use Signal but they never could use the
previous solutions. Plus, vibrant ecosystems are a good thing. Having several
chat applications that compete on features is a good thing.

~~~
koiz
LOL yes it is. Not sure how old you are but we've been here before.

~~~
memexy
I've seen various cycles a few times now. Cycle times in tech are short. Which
makes me think I should use the proper terminology and call them spirals.

------
tschellenbach
This has been done so many times, I wonder why it never worked out

------
loulouxiv
Why Matrix instead of good old XMPP ?

------
Ocha
for a minute I thought I had notion app open due to novachat using same
favicon.

~~~
fuddle
They host the site on Notion.

------
cw
This is the future.

------
akaktsn
Man if we could get something like this for snapchat.

