Introducing Rheinium
An independent home for clients and servers built on Telium, starting with Rhein.
Telium is group chat without the lock-in: you pick a homeserver or run your own, take your account with you when you move, and join communities on other servers with one identity. Its protocol is open and documented, which means anyone can write software that speaks it.
Rheinium is where we do that. It is an independent project, not part of Telium, that builds clients and servers for the protocol.
Why
A chat app stays open all day. On the desktop, that app is usually a web page wrapped in Electron: a full copy of Chromium and a JavaScript runtime per app, the memory to match, and a UI that never quite feels at home on the system it runs on. Telium deserves better than that on the desktop, so Rheinium builds the apps natively.
Rhein
The first of them is Rhein, a native desktop client for Linux written in Rust and GPUI, the GPU-rendered UI framework from the Zed editor. It talks to Telium servers directly and works next to the official web client on the same account: the same OPAQUE sign-in, the same guilds, and the same end-to-end encrypted conversations over MLS. It has the features of the official client: voice and video calls, screen sharing, federation across servers, bots and rich presence all work.
Rhein is in open beta as of today. Install it from the AUR, as an AppImage, as a prebuilt binary or from source.
What comes next
Rheingold, a Telium server, is planned as the second Rheinium project. Follow along here, in the changelog or through the RSS feed.