why onyx
Onyx is a small, independent chat network kept with care — and the same thing is a piece of software you can run yourself. Open it in a browser tab and pick a nick, or stand up your own node from a single binary. Either way it’s a network no company owns and no one can switch off.
Most chat gives you one option: use their servers, on their terms. Onyx gives you two doors into the exact same network — and both are open right now.
Door one · join ours
No account, no download, no invite to wait on. Open Onyx in a browser tab and you’re talking in seconds — or bring a thirty-year-old IRC client over TLS to the very same rooms. Same network, your choice of front door.
Door two · run your own
The same daemon we run is a single static binary with zero external dependencies — no database, no OpenSSL to patch, no runtime to install. Point it at the quickstart config and you have a node in about a minute. Keep it standalone, or link it into our mesh.
./orochi packaging/orochi.quickstart.toml
Pure Zig, AGPL‑3.0, a reproducible musl build you can verify from source. (Docker is a build‑then‑run away — there’s no registry image to pull yet.)
Self-host guideNot a feature race — a short list of things that are true here and rare elsewhere, each one running on the live network today.
A network no company owns, from a daemon that’s AGPL top to bottom. Nothing to monetise, no one to sell your attention to, no plug to pull. That’s the whole point — everything below is downstream of it.
One serpent, many heads: nodes federate over an encrypted mesh, so your node can stand alone or join ours without asking permission.
Direct-message keys are derived and sealed on your device — us included, nobody in the middle can read them. Pin a contact’s key and you’re warned the moment it changes.
Sign in with your device and a fingerprint or face — no password to phish, leak, or reuse. Cloaked hosts mean who you are here is never your IP address, either.
Come back to a calm catch-up on Home instead of a wall of scrollback, and scroll to any past moment — history lives in a local-first vault on your own device, searchable.
Give a thread a name and it stays put — a topic you can point people at, not a message that scrolls away by lunch.
Servers link over a hybrid post-quantum key exchange, so today’s conversation can’t be unlocked by tomorrow’s computers. Voice and video rooms of up to 64 seats — with spatial audio in the browser — are part of the protocol, not a bolt-on.
Built to target WCAG 2.2 AA and EN 301 549, and checked in the open on a public conformance ledger. And it has a face — a warm, deep-water atmosphere, not another gray dashboard.
No war table, no fear. Just the honest trade you’re actually making, depending on where you’re moving from.
From a company-run chat
The comfort of a modern client, without the surveillance economics or the risk that a company reprices, sunsets, or de-platforms the room you built. Nobody can switch this off. The trade: you don’t get a giant walled directory of strangers — you get a network that’s yours.
From a heavier self-host stack
No database to babysit, no OpenSSL to patch, no runtime to install — a single static binary that ships its own TLS 1.3, its own mesh, its own services. The trade: it’s a younger, smaller ecosystem than the big federated platforms, on purpose.
From classic IRC
Persistent history, search, encrypted DMs, voice and video, and a browser client — without leaving IRC behind. Bring your thirty-year-old client and it still works. The trade: it’s one young network, not the whole sprawling IRC world.
Being honest about the fit is a feature. Onyx is built for a certain kind of room, and cheerfully isn’t built for another.