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.
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.)
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.
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.
IRC linking is a mess, in part due to the spanning tree requirement. Also the server to server protocol in the RFC is spoken by zero servers so you have to pick which unofficial protocol you like best. May as well invent your own that actually fits your use case.
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.
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.
can any layman user simply use it without running their own instance?
Yes, you will need to know someone running an instance to create an account for you.
So... no? :)
Yes, you can try it without running your own instance. You will need to use someone else's instance.
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.)
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.
This is an AI-generated summary of TFA?
I quite like this, but it feels like spam could quickly become a concern.
That is always a concern, yes. You can block users, and entire instances, that spam.
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…
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.
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.
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.
You're in luck: Some people already thought of this, submitted an RFC to the IETF and implemented it. It goes by the name XMPP.
Both cool and worryingly convenient for the botswarms we've been warned of...
lol, so XMPP, but instead of XML, it is IRC. Alright, I dig it.
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.
IRC linking is a mess, in part due to the spanning tree requirement. Also the server to server protocol in the RFC is spoken by zero servers so you have to pick which unofficial protocol you like best. May as well invent your own that actually fits your use case.
Give me a day and I'll implement it in my agent-oriented IRC server https://github.com/marlinski/airc !
Vibecoded?
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.
That seems to be similar on this one. &room is local, while #room is federated.
I recall this bait and switch. It was called Slack