Parley: Federated, decentralised chat that speaks plain IRC

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.

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?

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?

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...?

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.

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.

Besides not having C runtime linked (which is great for scratch/distroless Docker images) - any other advantage of using a pure Go SQLite instead of the C binding?

Vibecoded?

Give me a day and I'll implement it in my agent-oriented IRC server https://github.com/marlinski/airc !

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.

But isn't IRC already federated?

I quite like this, but it feels like spam could quickly become a concern.

is there a list of public instances one could join somewhere? I kind of want to dip into irc again. it was peaceful.

This is exactly what i was thinking about for the last few weeks (but am too stupid to implement myself).

It’s like email just for IM…

Both cool and worryingly convenient for the botswarms we've been warned of...

I recall this bait and switch. It was called Slack

The connection to git.mills.io was interrupted while the page was loading.

lol, so XMPP, but instead of XML, it is IRC. Alright, I dig it.

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