Parley: Federated, decentralised chat that speaks plain IRC

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ddavidcollantes about 3 hours ago 57 commentsRead Article on git.mills.io

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Discussion Sentiment

67% Positive

Analyzed from 1372 words in the discussion.

Discussion (57 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

Conlectus•about 2 hours ago

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.

dale_glass•38 minutes ago

Unfortunately XMPP is an absolutely terrible protocol. IRC's not much good either, but at least it has the excuse of being ancient and limited in what it wanted to achieve.

I don't know how it just happens that sending text messages to people can manage to result in specs that are painful to implement.

segmondy•about 1 hour ago

or maybe they know about XMPP and prefer IRC. I have always wanted to build one of these on top of IRC. I grew up on IRC and sometimes just the nostalgia of familiar tech is what drives us to build towards it not how good it is.

jeremyjh•38 minutes ago

That’s where we’d expect a mention in the README to play a part.

RGS1811•about 1 hour ago

I've done this a few times. If I had to gesture at the root cause I'd say: LLMs lack curiosity and are trained to complete assignments, not to question their validity, so both the research phase and the questioning of intent tend to get short shrift prior to building anything.

sugarkjube•28 minutes ago

I'm not sure I agree. Seems to me to depend a lot on how one interacts with an LLM.

If you tell it to "build me an application X to do Y using programming language Z", it will comply.

If you interactively ask "I need X, can you suggest some options? use an existing product ? or build something using a library ? or build entirely myself ? can you suggest alternatives with pro's and con's ? Anything I should think of before deciding ?" then you will get an entirely different answer.

Maybe we need additional modes, aside from thinking mode, agentic mode etc. we need e.g. "sparring mode" ? or does such a thing already exist ?

jeremyjh•40 minutes ago

Agreed, you have to ask them to look for prior work. But then they will do a good job finding it in most cases. I think it’s partly their universal tunnel vision and partly sycophancy.

dewey•about 1 hour ago

That is currently still the differentiator between people producing code and shipping something and people who care and actually have years of experience shipping. At the current state how well you steer the LLM and which questions you ask still matters, maybe in the future "build me an app" will give amazing results, but right now you still need to know what you are doing.

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.

orangedog•37 minutes ago

You guys are way too critical and about the wrong things. "Waste of tokens"? Perhaps the author know of the tradeoffs and just wanted to build something.

How you went from seeing somebody's post to deciding they don't care is a pretty big jump, one that isn't warranted. This kind of post seems like the old but now more elaborated form of hating on something that you don't even know what it is.

It just isn't fair to the work that has been put in.

PunchyHamster•39 minutes ago

XMPP is massively bloated protocol that is badly managed for last 2 decades

davidcollantes•about 3 hours ago

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.

someonebaggy•about 2 hours ago

This is an AI-generated summary of TFA?

BonerWiener•about 1 hour ago

It's a copy paste of the readme intro. Don't know why it's left as a comment here

theandrewbailey•15 minutes ago

When someone makes a submission, the text field becomes a comment when the URL field is not empty. (but sometimes not?) It's a poorly designed form that should be redone.

xena•35 minutes ago

Hacker News marketing skills tell people to leave a context comment on Hacker News. Don't complain about it too much, that is our way of figuring out who is lazy in an obvious way!

altilunium•about 3 hours ago

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

davidcollantes•about 3 hours ago

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

grim_io•about 3 hours ago

So... no? :)

davidcollantes•about 3 hours ago

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.

singpolyma3•about 2 hours ago

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?

davidcollantes•about 1 hour ago

Bans are per server (for what I have seeing). Federated rooms continue to exist if a server drops off, as no server "owns" them.

esseph•about 1 hour ago

> Federated rooms continue to exist if a server drops off

That doesn't answer the question.

How are you resolving things like... user name collisions when the servers reconnect?

pferde•1 minute ago

This has been an issue for as long as IRC itself has existed. There are solutions to resolve such "netsplits" and "netjoins", but they all rely on the servers in the network being trusted and not malicious.

With Parley, where anyone can bring their own instance, and they are not guaranteed to not to be malicious, that could be an interesting issue to solve.

davidcollantes•42 minutes ago

I am not the owner of the project, I just use it. Federated rooms have no owners, there will be no collisions (they would simply merge). Nicks are tied to their own servers, and hence unique and will not collide.

aunderscored•about 2 hours ago

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.

someonebaggy•about 2 hours ago

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.

aunderscored•31 minutes ago

Except that now there's yet another standard, which nothing but this thing speaks. TS6 is very well used at the moment as everything in the Charybdis line speaks it, etc.

xena•38 minutes ago

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?

cromka•36 minutes ago

This is why we can no longer have nice things...

user2722•about 2 hours ago

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.

Fastidious•about 2 hours ago

That seems to be similar on this one. &room is local, while #room is federated.

user2722•25 minutes ago

Did not see that. Thanks for pointing that out! Will re-read the page.

mococa•about 1 hour ago

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?

rixed•about 1 hour ago

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...?

RobotToaster•about 1 hour ago

Or matrix

someonebaggy•about 2 hours ago

Vibecoded?

bigfishrunning•about 1 hour ago

clearly.

Marlinski•about 2 hours ago

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

itomato•44 minutes ago

Cool. I did something like that so agents and people could communicate with a Jira instance using Websocket-aware IRC and a browser-based client based on superchat.

Put the issue context in a #channel and invite external parties/entities, bring the results back to the work.

I have tested it but the complexity didn't justify the results in my experiment. I couldn't get it accepted into Atlassian Marketplace, either.

jagermo•about 1 hour ago

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

davidcollantes•19 minutes ago

The idea (what's encouraged) is that's so simple you can run it yourself. If you email me (email on profile), I can create an account for you on mine.

calvinmorrison•about 2 hours ago

I recall this bait and switch. It was called Slack

bigfishrunning•about 1 hour ago

Slack is pretty centralized, and also closed. You can't self-host at all.

Slack is a *different* bait and switch.

myaccountonhn•about 3 hours ago

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

davidcollantes•about 3 hours ago

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

shreddit•about 3 hours ago

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…

zaik•about 2 hours ago

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.

yvdriess•about 3 hours ago

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•about 2 hours ago

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•about 2 hours ago

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•about 3 hours ago

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

pixel_popping•about 1 hour ago

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

davidcollantes•about 1 hour ago

Sorry, I am sure it is the HN effect.

okwhateverdude•about 3 hours ago

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

singpolyma3•about 2 hours ago

Instead of TCP+XML it's HTTP+JSON

The IRC is just a front end. Could use any front end