Parley brings federated, serverless chat to any plain IRC client
Parley: Federated, decentralised chat that speaks plain IRC
Parley is a decentralized chat network where every person or team runs a small instance for their own domain. Instances discover each other via DNS SRV records and well-known identity documents, exchange signed ed25519 messages over HTTPS, and present the whole mesh to ordinary IRC clients like irssi or WeeChat with no plugins. Identities look like email — [email protected] — and messaging across domains federates automatically. It is a working proof of concept, not yet hardened.
Bob types /msg [email protected] hi and it just works, even if the two instances have never heard of each other before.
- Conlectus
There’s a specific downside to LLM-based development that people can get neck deep in a new project without interfacing with the existing work in the field.
In this case, this is basically a poorly specified implementation of half of XMPP. Of course, I half expect the LLM would have mentioned that at some point, but the repository does not.
- xena
How do you plan to handle bad actors creating biblical amounts of servers dynamically and then spamming at line rate from all of those servers?
- singpolyma3
So rooms are "global" between whatever hosts your host happens to know about? So it's one giant netsplit party forever and only your server admin can ban someone?
- rixed
Instead of a separate federated network for a single app, why not implement the app on top of a pre-existing federated network, so that nobody has to create yet another account?
Like, on top of atproto or activitypods or...?
- aunderscored
Interesting. Why not use an open link network? These will result in around the same state. Spam _will_ be an issue here, in general. And with a different backend you're going to struggle to use preexisting tooling to handle it.
Using & channels is fun, I'd be interested to see how many bots and clients fall over dead when faced with that particular bit of IRC history.
- davidcollantes
Parley is a chat network with no centre.
Every person (or team) runs a small instance for their own domain. Instances find each other through DNS and well-known identity documents, exchange signed messages over HTTPS, and present the whole federated network to ordinary IRC clients such as Lurker, Mango, mIRC, WeeChat, Textual, etc., without the need of any plugins.
- user2722
I had a pseudo-plan for something like this but for reasons related to privacy I had two types of chatrooms:
* regular chats, existing only on the server, no leaking the chat transcript except via users, but never via server to server.
* chambers: a global chatroom, located at a server, maybe with a MQTT anyone could subscribe to.
This never left the early planning stages though, but I thought the segregation between federated chatrooms and regular chatrooms was of interest to keep in sync with IRC open but closed nature of chats.
- myaccountonhn
I quite like this, but it feels like spam could quickly become a concern.