One relay bot decides which platforms share a VTuber's chat

The setup

Restream is a third-party service that takes one outgoing stream and distributes it to multiple platforms at once, a setup many VTubers use to reach audiences on several services simultaneously. Restream's own help centre, retrieved 16 September 2026, documents a companion feature, Restream Chat, in the article What is Restream Chat?, and its cross-platform mechanism in Relay comments across streaming platforms, both living support documents rather than dated releases. The company's own multistreaming page states the service supports over 30 destination platforms.

What the documents show

The Restream Chat article states the feature reads messages from connected platforms and displays them together, and its own supported-platforms table lists twelve destination types by read, reply and relay capability: Twitch, YouTube, Discord and Kick each support all three; Facebook Page, LinkedIn and X support read and reply but not relay; Facebook Profile is read-only; and Instagram, TikTok and custom RTMP destinations support none of the three. The relay article documents the enabling steps, a setting called Relay mode inside the Bot tab of Chat settings, and states plainly that relay only works with Twitch, Kick, YouTube and Discord, meaning only those four channels can receive a comment relayed from elsewhere; it gives the concrete example that a Facebook comment can be relayed to YouTube, but a YouTube comment cannot be relayed back to Facebook.

The craft

Running a simulcast well means treating chat as its own configuration step, not an assumption: the documented table shows Instagram and TikTok comments never reach Restream Chat at all, so a performer promising to read every comment live needs to check those platforms separately. Getting relay right means confirming a destination is one of the four documented receivers, since the relay article's own example shows the effect is one-directional between an unsupported and a supported platform, not a shared room.

Keeping the creator in control

Because read, reply and relay support are each documented per platform rather than as one unified guarantee, a creator running a multistream is responsible for knowing which audiences can see each other's comments and which cannot, so no viewer is treated as part of a shared conversation the documentation says is not actually happening. This is an editorial point beyond Restream's own pages: a short on-screen note about which platform's chat is being read aloud avoids leaving an unsupported platform's audience feeling ignored for reasons the software itself never surfaces to them.

• Which of your destinations are read-only, and does your on-stream chat reading account for that?
• Are you only promising relay between Twitch, YouTube, Discord and Kick, the four documented receivers?
• Do your Instagram or TikTok viewers know their comments never reach your unified chat view?

A simulcast reaches more viewers, but Restream's own per-platform table is clear that it does not merge every one of their chats into a shared room, and that documented asymmetry should shape how a performer promises to interact with an audience split across platforms.