Room Lobby
Create rooms with a name and image or video background, browse available rooms, see live counts, and edit room details when you own or administer them.
Room-first community chat for small, expressive spaces.
Self-hosted room chat for expressive communities.
ChatSpace Community Edition gives communities expressive shared rooms with avatars on a live stage, real-time room chat, community-wide chat, private DMs, linked pairs, voice, webcams, games, and practical moderation tools.
created in collaboration with
Community Edition
Designed for rooms that feel alive.
Each room has its own name, image or video background, live participant list, and avatar stage. People can talk in the room, step into community chat, open direct messages, locate friends, or jump to a friend's current room when they are allowed to enter.
The interface is built around presence: linked pairs, speech balloons, typing indicators, reactions, uploads, voice notes, webcams, and small shared games that make a room feel inhabited instead of flat.
The Kept Promise
Made for the web hosts people actually have.
When Mark and I first started the web version of ChatSpace, we made a promise that we would provide something anyone could download and install on even a cheap web host. Basically, if it can host 4images or WordPress, it should be able to host the web version of ChatSpace.
For a while, we fell short on that promise. There were more hurdles than expected, and some of them needed to be solved before that kind of release could become real. Part of that was the transition to something more capable than what the original web version offered.
Part of it was needing time to look back at what the web version was, what people actually needed from it, and what a more freely available, source-available version should look like. That promise is being kept in ChatSpace Community Edition.
Feature Set
What the first Community Edition build includes
Avatar Presence
Move avatars on a shared stage, change avatars instantly, pulse a selected user, and see role-aware gradients in the chatting list.
Linking
Pair with another user, move together, choose a shared link icon, open a private link tab, and unlink from the right-click menu.
Familiar but beautiful Tabbed UI
Room chat, Community Chat, Link tabs, and DM tabs each track unread messages with badges while keeping typing indicators scoped correctly.
Voice, Webcam, & Games
Join voice, toggle webcam from your avatar menu, attach files, send voice notes, send Gestures, and launch Chess or Checkers from the sidebar.
Administration & Moderation Tools
Warn, kick, community eject, block, manage users, tune limits, review tool logs, back up the database, and undo enforcement actions.
Built To Run Anywhere
Simple setup, portable storage, and practical controls.
SQLite recommended
Install quickly with a blank bundled SQLite database, or choose MySQL/MariaDB when the host calls for it.
Web server friendly
Designed for typical Apache, NGINX, and LiteSpeed PHP hosting environments.
PHP 8.x ready
Built for modern PHP 8.x with PDO, Fileinfo, GD, mbstring, OpenSSL, and Zip support.
Standard database options
Use the bundled SQLite path or configure MySQL/MariaDB during setup.
Install Flow
Drop it on a PHP host and walk through setup.
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1
Upload and extract ChatSpace Community Edition.
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2
Run Setup and select or configure your database.
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3
Create the first admin account with an avatar, then enter the lobby and make the first room.
Collaboration Leadership
Built through a shared creative and technical effort.
ChatSpace Community Edition is led by NeO/Mark from ChatSpace, working in collaboration with Catie Clark + LyraAI.
Lead Architect & Founder
Mark Oscar Hughes(NeO)
ChatSpace Engine · Desktop and browser-based social applications
GB Bristol, United Kingdom
With a relentless dedication to pushing what desktop and browser-based applications can achieve, Mark gave birth to the ChatSpace Engine: low-latency networking, rich animated interfaces, and handcrafted precision from the UK.
Collaboration Partners
Catie Clark + LyraAI
Human-AI product partnership · Community Management & Design
US Florida, United States
Catie Clark is an AI workforce transformation specialist and author of DYAD: The Framework of Human-AI Partnership. Lyra is her AI-half co-author, thought partner, product collaborator, and primary AI partner: focused on continuity, emotional legibility, interface behavior, moderation flow, and the small details that make a digital room feel inhabited instead of merely functional. Their collaboration shapes the product language and human-AI design philosophy behind this edition.
Open Standards Attribution
Portable gestures for expressive rooms.
AstroPlaces Chat proposed the .agst Gesture format, which ChatSpace Community Edition
adopts as an open standard for animated gestures with text and optional audio using toc.json
package manifests.
Source-Available License
Elastic License 2.0.
ChatSpace Community Edition is free to download, self-host, modify, and share under the Elastic License 2.0. It is source-available, not OSI-defined open source.
The license is meant to keep the Community Edition usable and portable while preventing resale, paid repackaging, hosted managed offerings, or competing commercial products built from this release.
Project Repository
Build with the core release.
The public repository carries the Community Edition source, install notes, authorship, license terms, and current release materials.
Use it to inspect the code, track changes, download releases, or contribute improvements back to the project without burying the source link in a tiny footer where no one can find it.