Backchannel is expanding the idea of an in-browser discussion sidebar beyond a single community, presenting comments from multiple online sources beside the page a person is reading. The open-source userscript, previously called HNewhere, can combine conversations from Hacker News, Bluesky, Reddit and other supported services into one thread. Users choose which sources are active through individual checkboxes.
The renamed project retains the same history, installation address and settings as HNewhere. According to its documentation, existing installations update and adopt the Backchannel name in place. Previously saved preferences, hidden sites, reading queues and collapsed threads remain intact. The change arrived with version 1.6.0 as the tool broadened from its original focus on one site to a configurable collection of sources.
Backchannel checks visited pages against the selected services and signals when it finds related discussion. Each displayed comment identifies its origin, allowing material from different communities to appear in a shared conversation without obscuring where it came from. The tool also offers a blended front page made from enabled sources, giving users another way to discover linked articles.
An optional annotation system connects discussion back to the underlying text. Quotes in comments can be matched to passages in an article, while a heat-map effect indicates sections receiving attention even when they are not quoted directly. Selecting a highlight filters the thread toward comments about that passage. The project also describes enhanced PDF highlighting, although that option is not supported in Firefox. Users can disable annotations when the sidebar is closed if the markings are distracting.
Interaction is not limited to reading. On supported sources, people can vote, reply or submit through a popup on the source's own site, using an existing session there. The project says the script does not handle the user's password. It also lets users attach private notes to webpages and PDFs, with those notes stored locally.
Privacy behavior varies by enabled service. The project says Backchannel has no backend, analytics or telemetry, but it still contacts external hosts to locate conversations. Reddit requests may be linked to a signed-in account or, when signed out, carry a device identifier. Other integrations use different lookup patterns: Lobsters receives a page's domain, Wikipedia receives page addresses through its API, and Bluesky discovery relies initially on the independent Constellation link index. Webmail, banking pages, authentication flows and cloud consoles are excluded.
Installation requires a userscript manager such as Tampermonkey, Violentmonkey or Userscripts for Safari. Backchannel itself is distributed as one file with no build step or dependencies, and its source is available for inspection and modification under the MIT license. That compact design makes the project's behavior auditable, while its source-by-source controls give users a direct say in which discussion networks accompany their browsing.
