This change started as an experiment, but it turned out to be a pretty refreshing shift in my own experience using the chat protocol we created a while back as part of @peak.open.
Important part first: this is not a forced replacement for the standard Sting Chat interface some people are already used to. The familiar embedded Sting Chat widget is still there and still works. Peak Chat is simply a new option you can switch to from the Settings page if you want a more integrated chat experience inside PeakD itself.
Instead of treating chat as only an embedded external frame, PeakD now has a proper native chat workspace for the main /chat page and for the slideout panel too.
In practice that means the new chat feels much more like part of PeakD itself:
This is one of those changes where the technical side was fairly large, but the point for users is actually simple: the chat area feels more coherent now.
And to make this super clear: these two chat versions are perfectly interchangeable. They still share the same Sting protocol/backend, so using Peak Chat does not put you in some separate chat universe. You can chat just fine with people using the other frontend.
This is worth repeating because I do not want people to read "new chat" as "the old one is gone".
It is not gone.
The familiar Sting Chat widget remains available as the standard embedded option, and there is now a setting that lets you switch between Sting Chat and Peak Chat. The switch is also available as a quick side button in the slideout panel.
So if you already like the existing Sting flow, you can keep using it. If you want to try the new native PeakD version, it is there as an alternative.
That felt like the right balance. PeakD gets room to evolve a more integrated chat experience without forcing everyone to immediately abandon the UI they already know.
If you want to look at the open source Sting stack itself, the repos are here: frontend and backend.
I am not going to turn this post into a commit-by-commit changelog, but a few things are worth calling out.
The new native chat got several rounds of layout and usability tuning. We reworked the structure for direct chats, group conversations, and community channels, improved the composer, polished the message view, and made the overall workspace behave much better across page mode and panel mode.
I am not going to lie: if you are used to Discord, the new chat UI should look pretty familiar.
There were also some smaller but important quality improvements behind the scenes:
This first version is already very usable, but it is not feature-complete yet. A few things like reply to message, edit, delete, and some extra chat actions are still missing from the native UI and should land in the next update.
PeakD has had chat for a long time, but the experience was still heavily shaped by the external widget model. That worked, and it is still useful, but it also meant the chat surface never felt fully aligned with the rest of the product.
Peak Chat gives us a path toward a more native and more flexible chat experience inside PeakD, while still keeping the standard Sting Chat widget around for people who prefer the familiar UI.
That is probably the most important part of this update: more choice, not less. Both are valid, and both are being maintained.
This is exactly the kind of feature where real usage matters more than my local impressions. If you try the new chat on PeakD and something feels better, worse, confusing, or half-baked, let me know.
The whole point of shipping it as an option alongside Sting Chat is that we can improve it in the open without making the transition unnecessarily disruptive.
