Hearth

A small group chat for friends, clubs, and study groups, in the style of Slack and Discord. Create a server, invite people with a link or a six-character code, and talk in channels where messages arrive instantly. It ships with sign-in, a database, realtime channels, and a polished landing page, all running on Yard.

Features

• Servers: create your own or join someone else's, and switch between them from the side rail
• Channels: one topic per channel. Admins create, rename, and delete them
• Realtime messages: messages appear for everyone the moment they're sent, with typing indicators
• Presence: the member list shows who's in the channel right now and who's offline
• Easy invites: share a link, or read out a six-character code that leaves out I, O, 0, and 1 so nobody mixes them up. Invite links show the server name and member count before you join
• Two roles: admins manage channels, delete any message, and promote or demote members. The server's creator always stays an admin, so a server is never left without one
• Profiles: pick a username and it updates everywhere, including in channels people already have open
• Clean conversation view: messages from the same person in a row are grouped together, and everyone keeps the same avatar color across servers
• Message history: the latest messages load when you open a channel, and each channel keeps its last 500

Built on Yard

• Yard Auth: visitors sign in with their Yard account. Hearth never handles a password, and after the first consent screen, sign-in is silent
• Hosted service: the entire backend is a single fetch handler with no server to run or scale
• Objects: each channel is its own realtime room that holds its messages and live connections, so delivery and presence need no polling
• Database: users, servers, memberships, and channels live in the project's own SQLite database, and schema migrations apply themselves on deploy
• Pricing: a single free tier, so signing in is the only gate. Add a paid tier to start charging

Technical details

• Plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: no framework, no build step, no dependencies
• Roles are checked on the server for every action, and again inside the channel for message deletes. The client is never trusted with them
• Sensible limits (2,000-character messages, 50 channels per server, 500 messages kept per channel) set as constants at the top of one file

Requirements

A Pro plan, for the hosted service, database, objects, and custom landing page. Yard Auth is included.