Show HN: BotParty, a native macOS chat app where conversations are documents
botparty.comHi HN, I built BotParty.
It's a native macOS/iOS chat client for openrouter, built around Swift's DocumentGroup.
Each conversation is a regular file on disk — you can save them in folders, sync them with iCloud, email it. I made it because I got sick of the claude desktop app changing it’s system prompts on me constantly. I also wanted to be able to own all my own chats, and archive them locally. You can branch conversations by using ‘duplicate’ in the finder - which is something that i’ve found missing from all the other desktop chat apps.
A few things that fell out of the document model: - Conversations are diffable, so git history works - You can have many open at once in tabs/windows - Share Sheet and Spotlight search work - Nothing is locked into my app
I used openrouter so you can use claude/chatgpt/etc.
Thanks for reading this far. Feedback very welcome, especially on the file format.
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