Links first: website · download, installer or portable exe · the official Hearth community

The three layers

1. The desktop shell. Electron with a React + TypeScript renderer. One window, a left rail of communities, channels in the middle, members on the right. Light and dark themes. Lucide icons. The in-app updater polls a small JSON feed, downloads the new installer, checks its SHA-256 and swaps itself out.

2. Data and realtime. Postgres is the source of truth, and row-level security does the permission work: whether you can read a channel, post in it, or see a DM is a policy on the table, not a check sprinkled through client code. Messages, reactions, edits, replies and read state ride Postgres change streams to every connected client, so a message typed on one machine shows up on another in well under a second with no custom socket server to run.

3. Voice and video. WebRTC through a LiveKit server. When you click a voice channel, the app asks an edge function for a short-lived room token. The function checks that you are actually a member of that channel (or that DM) before it signs anything, so the media server never has to know about Hearth's permission model. Mute, deafen, camera, and screen or single-window share are all LiveKit tracks.

What that buys a small team

• No bespoke realtime server to babysit.
• Permission bugs are mostly SQL policy bugs, which are easier to test and reason about than scattered if (isAdmin) checks.
• Voice scales with LiveKit, not with us.

What's in 1.1.0 for users

• Communities with categories, text and voice channels, invite links, and a Discover page for public ones
• Reactions, replies, edits, @mentions with user cards, typing indicators
• Friends, DMs with read state, calls with camera and screen share
• Roles via right-click, role pills on cards, per-channel permissions (read-only announcement channels), kick/ban, moderation log
• Welcome messages with {user} and {server} placeholders
• Email + password sign-up with verification, or Google sign-in; a library of built-in avatars
• Installer and portable builds, in-app updates

The honest caveats

• Windows only today. The stack can produce Linux and macOS builds; they are untested, so they are not shipped.
• Not code-signed yet. Windows SmartScreen will say "Windows protected your PC" on first run. More info → Run anyway. A signing certificate is on the list.
• Source is public, licence is not written yet, so "source available" is the right phrase for now, not "open source".
• Young project, small team, rough edges. Bugs go to #bug-reports in the official community, or GitHub.

If you run a small community and want something that feels like a plain, fast desktop app, give Hearth a try and tell us what breaks.