Parley: Federated, decentralised chat that speaks plain IRC

> No channel modes and no channel operators, which is a decision rather than a gap: a global channel is owned by nobody, so there is nobody to be an operator of it. Blocking is per person and per instance instead

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.

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?

Haha so this project speaks IRC, no less :) This is surely relevant then: https://www.mirc.com/split.html

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?

Is anyone leveraging IRC/XMPP/etc for agents or A2A communication? It seems like a natural fit; all the "human agents communicating" abstractions and underlying technology pieces are in place and mature, as are methods for dealing with unruly actors.

I've wondered why I haven't seen this everywhere.

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.

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.

I'm searching for a simple, self-hosted chat system that allows me to host unlimited bots and send messages (with notifications) to my iPhone easily.

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?

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.

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

Vibecoded?

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...?

This is pretty much just a reinvented Matrix protocol. Nearly identical.

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

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

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?

> "Scrollback that follows you rather than your client"

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.

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…

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

Parlay?

IRC is popular because it’s bad. I don’t believe there will ever be a replacement for this reason.

But isn't IRC already federated?

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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I recall this bait and switch. It was called Slack