Build One Bot, Reach Every Chat: A Universal WebSocket Bridge for IM Channels

sloth — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 03:47:57 +0000

Every chat platform reinvents the wheel. WeChat has its own API, Lark has another, Telegram another still — and if you're building a bot, an agent, or any service that needs to talk to people across IM channels, you end up writing and maintaining a separate integration for each one. The plumbing differs, the auth flows differ, the message formats differ, and every new channel means another chunk of bespoke code in your app.

I got tired of that, so I built OpenClaw Bridge — a universal WebSocket bridge server that sits between your client and any number of IM backends. The idea is simple: your app speaks one protocol over a single WebSocket, and the bridge translates that into whatever each backend channel expects. Here's the shape of it:

Client ──[WebSocket]──▶ Bridge Server ──[ChannelPlugin API]──▶ Backend Channels

The key design decision is that the bridge contains zero plugin-specific code. It doesn't know how WeChat logs in, how Lark formats media, or how Telegram handles reply threading. Instead, it works with any channel that implements a standard ChannelPlugin interface. Install a plugin, drop its credentials into config.json, and it just works — WeChat, Lark, Telegram, Mattermost, IRC, QQ, WhatsApp, and whatever comes next.

In this post I'll walk through why a bridge like this is worth building, how the envelope protocol keeps clients channel-agnostic, and how a subscription model lets multiple clients share one set of connected accounts without tripping over each other. If you've ever copy-pasted your fifth nearly-identical IM integration, this one's for you.

For more information, visit https://github.com/sloth-os/openclaw-bridge

mm-gateway: One Provider-Neutral API for Image, Video, and Music Generation

sloth — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 09:32:30 +0000

Every generative-AI app I worked on hit the same wall. Pick a backend — OpenAI for images, Volcengine for video, Mureka for music — and before long the app is full of that provider's SDK quirks: its field names, its sync-vs-async polling loop, its error shapes. Then if want to swap one backend, or add a second one for failover, and it's a rewrite.

mm-gateway is an open-source Python gateway that sits in front of that mess. One provider-neutral contract — over 13 backends:
OpenAI · Google · xAI · DashScope · Volcengine · Flux · Stability · ElevenLabs · MiniMax · Mureka · ACE-Step · OpenRouter · UdioAPI

The idea is simple: provider wire formats never appear in application code. Every request goes through a strict, modality-specific envelope — an ordered list of typed input parts plus provider-neutral parameters — and each backend adapter translates that to its native SDK or REST shape.

For more information, visit https://github.com/sloth-os/mm-gateway

DEV Community: sloth

Build One Bot, Reach Every Chat: A Universal WebSocket Bridge for IM Channels

mm-gateway: One Provider-Neutral API for Image, Video, and Music Generation