Hi HN, I'm the dev behind Hush. The story of this project goes back more than a couple of years, but I'll cut it short. Me and my friends built this because we wanted a self-hosted, private alternative to Discord and Slack. Current platforms like Matrix didn’t cut it for us. Matrix is well known for having lingering issues in its cryptography implementations that haven't been fully addressed yet (read
https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-matrixs-ol... and
https://soatok.blog/2026/02/17/cryptographic-issues-in-matri...).
Quick video:
https://x.com/sonoyarin/status/2059013987140800563
Here is how it works under the hood:
* Protocol: MLS (post-quantum RFC 9420) to handle group encryption.
* Client: desktop is Electron, crypto core is written in Rust (openmls) and compiled to WebAssembly.
* Server: It's a Go backend with LiveKit for media. It routes opaque packets and handles the database. A dumb pipe routing opaque bytes in Go.
It's open source (AGPL-3.0). You can sign up on the hosted instance, or spin up the entire stack on your own Linux box in a few minutes using the setup script.
Website:
https://gethush.live/ The main repo is here:
https://github.com/hushhq/hush
We'd love to hear your thoughts on it. Also, the hosted instance needs to be warmed up and tested. Hop on it!
