Yet another Hacker News

Parley: Federated, decentralised chat that speaks plain IRC

69 points davidcollantes 1 hour ago 18 comments

davidcollantes 1 hour ago | parent

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.

altilunium 1 hour ago | parent

can any layman user simply use it without running their own instance?

davidcollantes 1 hour ago | parent

Yes, you will need to know someone running an instance to create an account for you.

grim_io 1 hour ago | parent

So... no? :)

jagged-chisel 1 hour ago | parent

Yes, you can try it without running your own instance. You will need to use someone else's instance.

NoboruWataya 26 minutes ago | parent

Presumably if the protocol becomes popular you will have public instances that anyone* can sign up to, the same way other federated services work now.

(It's approximately as hard for a layman user to sign up to a Mastodon instance as it is to sign up for X. The fact that most layman users don't do that is a separate issue.)

davidcollantes 1 hour ago | parent

If you (top and child commentator) want to try without running your own, please send me an email: david dot collantes at gmail dot com.

myaccountonhn 50 minutes ago | parent

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

davidcollantes 46 minutes ago | parent

That is always a concern, yes. You can block users, and entire instances, that spam.

shreddit 48 minutes ago | parent

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…

yvdriess 44 minutes ago | parent

Many earth rotations ago, I was IMing through an mIRC bot because I refused to install MSN. This kind of reminds me of that too.

Athas 27 minutes ago | parent

I used Bitlbee until not that many earth rotations ago - it's an IRC daemon that provides bridging of various other chat protocols. It worked way better than you would expect, especially back in the day when you could use XMPP to connect to the various proprietary chat services.

I didn't stop using it until I stopped caring about those chat services.

doubled112 5 minutes ago | parent

These days I run a Matrix home server with bridges to Slack and WhatsApp so I can use fewer chat clients.

I do wish the Matrix client situation was less messy.

padolsey 46 minutes ago | parent

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

okwhateverdude 43 minutes ago | parent

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

aunderscored 25 minutes ago | parent

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.

Marlinski 20 minutes ago | parent

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

someonebaggy 9 minutes ago | parent

Vibecoded?