Hey HN, I built Oval because I use Open WebUI as my self-hosted ChatGPT alternative but missed having a proper native Mac app for it.
What it does:
- Native SwiftUI macOS client that connects to any Open WebUI server
- On-device voice mode — STT and TTS run locally via RunAnywhere SDK (Whisper ONNX or WhisperKit on Apple Neural Engine), only the LLM call goes to your server
- Realtime transcription with speaker diarization (FluidAudio — Pyannote + WeSpeaker, all on-device)
I built Onera because I was uncomfortable sending sensitive code to LLM APIs in plaintext. Most hosted inference today requires trusting the provider not to log or inspect prompts, but technically the infrastructure still has access. I wanted a setup where the server operator itself could not read user data.
Onera uses AMD SEV-SNP trusted execution environments to run inference inside a hardware encrypted VM, where memory is encrypted and isolated from the host. The client first performs remote attestation to verify the enclave, and then establishes an encrypted channel directly into it. Prompts are sent through this secure channel and processed entirely inside the enclave, so even the machine running the workload cannot inspect them.
The API is OpenAI compatible, so it works with existing tools like OpenClaw, OpenWebUI, Cursor, Claude Code, or anything using the OpenAI SDK, without requiring changes to the client architecture.
Matrix's UI/UX is actually really flexible with multiple clients.
You aren't struck with Element, you can even use TUI clients or any clients.
For the web, the one which I really love is cinny.
Cinny is really awesome, its UI/UX is better than discord imo.
I recommend people to check out the matrix ecosystem of clients to see what they like, because I also liked the fractal gnu app & it has tons of clients.
The biggest immediate win that we can achieve for our users is to remove all (!) technical jargon from our landing pages and product ui.
This is a problem throughout all FOSS. For example in KDE:
> Do x when Plasma starts.
Wtf do I care what Plasma is. Oh, you mean my computer? Yeah makes sense.
Raycast: You can search files, have a calculator, a translator…
KRunner: You can run terminal commands and convert characters to hexadecimal.
It is so obvious that these products are designed by developers for developers. From my experience, this friction is everything. You cannot expect people to intuitively figure it out.
I understand what you are trying to see but this is the price of freedom. Freedom of having multiple clients.
But Ignorance is also bliss and I recommend you (or many people) as such to be ignorant if it feels frictional to them and just use cinny.
"Just use cinny" It really can't get any simpler than that for most purposes in my opinion
cinny is really improving in adding features plus its open source and I do feel like its UI/UX done right for the most part.
So I get what you mean but there's no free lunch. I really don't know what we are comparing against given that discord is literally adding User ID verification. This feels such an non-issue to it and I hope you can agree with that.
So in essence, to break the network effects of discord. I recommend people to embrace cinny for the most part if they are worried about lack of UI/UX or the amount of options and what to pick. I had done some amounts of search and this is what I landed on for the most part.
This is actually the reason I said "Just use Cinny"
So in a way, the answer's sort of because "I am saying so" but as with all things the answer's subjective but I hope that you can try matrix and enjoy the clients that you wish.
I would recommend you to "Just use cinny", Just try it once and have fun :D See what you like the most and then recommend it then instead to your friends/community.
I am gonna say, Just use cinny but you can say just use fractal and both could be valid and the beauty of the protocol in this sense is the fact that we can all still talk to each other :)
Cinny really fixes the UI/UX problem in my personal experience, even better than discord.
And y'know technically this problem still persists with other messaging protocols like how should a new user know they should use X client and the limitations of X client (UI/UX). Matrix as such meets half way through and cinny can then streamline the experience.
You or anyone using matrix doesn't have to know so much.
The only thing one has to know is "Just use cinny" (in my honest opinion) and everything else is actually really simple.
And I feel like new users like any new users of any tech (discord was once new too) knows simply because the time is convenient/somewhat mouth of word.
I feel like people should convince others to meet on cinny (matrix) because then we can have network effects which is actually a really big issue in my opinion.
So the answer's mouth of word. I hope you can spread the word and hope that you can try cinny. It's seriously that good and I am doing my best spreading the mouth of word.
Is it really though? The average user doesn't need to know about all other clients, how it all works, etc. They just "open this website, register, and you're in!"
It's not like the registration process necessarily involves typing in the server IP and port number, picking and setting up an advanced TUI client or something else.
It's beneficial for the average user to know that other clients exist at the very least; it's rather common in the matrix space I'm in that someone asks "how do I do X" without clarifying which client they use, and as such the question is unanswerable (or, worse, someone may answer with info about a different client; or they use some client that noone else does and as such noone can help them).
As some specific example, it's happened a couple times that someone's using a client that doesn't support rendering spoilers as spoilered, and as such they made unspoilered replies of something that should've been spoilered (and of course many clients (incl. the Elements) don't even have a sane way to type spoilers).
If you're saying the user either has to put up with a shit client (friction) or go looking for other clients (friction) (and know they have to do that (friction!)) then yes it's friction.
The Lounge is open website, type name, you're in. Matrix definitely is not.
I would recommend using Nheko instead, and not registering on the overloaded flagship server. I have an old matrix.org account as a backup but I try to use smaller servers mostly.
Yeah but that's exactly what email doesn't do, right? Create account, send email to anyone on any server is the use case it was invented to solve. There are tons of issues with frictionless here if you don't want spam, obviously.
I would love to know why it's considered a feature for you.
I remember messing with bouncers and reading the backlog from a 3rd party page. Bots that would ping other members when they come online. It was cumbersome.
Because I prefer online conversations to work like IRL ones: Ephemeral. Sure each individual might keep their own log if they want but the server itself doesn’t and setting aside all the issues with modern datasets being used for training all sorts of algorithms, just the concept of stepping into a digital room without all the baggage of the last twenty hours of conversation is _mentally refreshing_. It also changes people’s behaviour for the better IME.
Saving logs is gross, chats should be ephemeral. In any case there's HistServ and IRCv3 /chathistory nowadays, so if you really want it you can have it.
That all the minute garbage everyone posts is preserved forever in an unfiltered state I think is a root cause of the mental degradation that results from using Discord: kids don't have anywhere to 'post into the void' anymore. Preserving past events and relationships through oral history as opposed to a big monolithic search engine entails a far more human element to IRC.
But on IRC you had your own log, and sometimes the server made the full logs public. It was just cumbersome to access. What I said and you said in my presets was still logged.
It's a muddy middle ground where neither you are I are satisfied. Far from perfect.
I wanted to disagree but I really miss IRC internet. Saving everything we ever said online was a mistake. We need to focus on ephemeral chat making a comeback.
Saving logs has been essential for work, in the past, because we were always to write real documentation when necessary. Mind you, this was local to our machine.
IRC does not even have offline messages, unless you pay / host a bouncer. Which you first have to know about.
I'm not sure if any client has solve this, but what about image / video / file hosting? You can't just drag 'n drop a image into a chat. You have to host it on a 3rd party site and link it.
I do wonder how server management is now adays. In Discord you can host your own server with a few clicks and make it easy to adjust permissions and controls invites. I would assume IRC is also lacking behind. But would love to hear more about the current state.
Discord has invite links, where people without the app or account can quickly join. In IRC you have the IRC:// link, but that does not work for people who don't have a client installed. Then you can do a web client link, but that is not optimal for people who already have their favorite client set up :)
In Discord you can't "host" your own "server". You can create a room (internally called a guild, misleadingly referred to as "server" in ui and by a lot of people) on THE discord server, their server, and that room can be split into channels. But the room and the server belongs to discord.
First and foremost, IRC is a protocol. Everything you name here are mostly issues that are not a protocol problem, but client and service issues which can be solved.
Otherwise it's not really an alternative. It does not matter if it's technically a protocol. Users don't care about if it's a protocol, IRC clients had over 10 years to catch up.
IRC for main chat, Mumble for voice chat when gaming. Been solid for decades. I have at least 3 functional Mumble servers saved (including my own) in my client, most of them are associated with an IRC community. I occasionally hear "Anyone down for some Quake? Hop on Mumble." or something to that effect. Mumble is pretty easy to host, so if you're using it with a small to medium group of friends, I'd say just throw up a server on your LAN somewhere. It's got decent mobile clients on F-Droid as well if you need one.
Some of my gaming buddies on Discord needed help getting that properly working. Asking them to set up and use both IRC and Mumble would be a step too far.
This is a common trap HN falls into. Stuff that’s easy and practical for people of our capabilities can be a nightmarish hellscape for other people.
This is very close to something that happened to a friend of mine. They were trying to follow a MoltBot installation guide, but clicked on a different link that looked legitimate. That page instructed them to paste a command into Terminal.
After running it, macOS immediately started asking for multiple permissions, which in hindsight was the big warning sign.
But for someone who is non technical might have ran with it.
> After running it, macOS immediately started asking for multiple permissions, which in hindsight was the big warning sign.
From what understand of MoltBot, I would expect it to ask for a lot of permissions. I guess maybe they are prompted closer to configuration time in the actual app.
