Parley: Federated, decentralised chat that speaks plain IRC
Discussion 129 comments
I've wondered why I haven't seen this everywhere.
That doesn't answer the question.
How are you resolving things like... user name collisions when the servers reconnect?
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.
(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.)
I currently have an XMPP server running, which is fine, I guess. I've looked into chatMail. I have considered hosting an IRC server.
At this point, I'm considering just setting up my own NTFY server and writing a chat client for it.
Does anyone have any ideas for what the lightest weight, simplest solution might be?
By the way, for years now, i have used a little python (cli) app to send messages into a private matrix room. This room has 2 people in it: me and a bot. (The bot is simply the matrix account that sends the messages.) I went this route because i did not want to install another app - such as ntfy - on my mobile simply to receive server notifications, etc. And, since i had ben on matrix already chatting with friends, it happened to be a low-effort approach. To clarify, i am no longer self-hosting my own synapse home server...so i'm simply piggybacking on the matrix.org one...but that has helped at least unify my notifications and comms to a good degree.
Now, if you were to aske me to implement my "notifications system" via a different approach, funny enough, i would gauge between XMPP and ntfy to see which is lighterweight....because i believe them to both be quite light on the need for resources. I don't know which is lighter (sorry, i know i'm not answering your question). however, i *think* the ntfy server is less hasle....Only because xmpp takes a little more work to setup...at least that was my experience a couple of years ago. I cast no shade on either xmpp nor ntfy - because to me boh are awesome...i' m merely saying that resources needs aside, i wonder if ntfy might need less time from YOU.
I do this with IRC. I used to have a blog post up about it, back when blogs weren't just training data providers for LLMs, but I'm afraid it's been deleted.
tl;dr IRC works great, but you need to wire up push notifications. For android I used pushbullet, for iOS I am still evaluating the alternatives but pushover looks okay. IRC itself is nice because the protocol is shit simple, to the point that if you can type fast enough to respond to the pingpongs you can cosplay as a bot using nothing but telnet. As a text protocol it's easy to inspect and doesn't require binary decoding of packets for debugging.
I recommend the Ergo ircd. It ships as a single binary (golang), can support tens of thousands of clients, is at the forefront of the ircv3 modernization initiative, and is under active development.
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.
In this case, it's just a waste of tokens as something not very unique was generated that doesn't have a real use case, or solves anyone's problem. As with many AI generated projects, I'm willing to bet that OP themselves will not using it any more in a month.
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.
* 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.
This form of LLM speak annoys the absolute shit out of me. It's a bot trying to emulate the worst reassuring sales copy you could imagine.
It’s like email just for IM…
I didn't stop using it until I stopped caring about those chat services.
I do wish the Matrix client situation was less messy.
The IRC is just a front end. Could use any front end
Slack is a *different* bait and switch.
That's completely unworkable. Lets say I create #some_minority, and people from many different servers join. Some shithead comes and starts screaming slurs at us. Now the admin for every server must block that person. Multiply that by every channel, and every admin is responsible for moderating the entire ecosystem. The only way they can do this is with shared blocklists, which have been a nightmare on mastodon.