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Parley: Federated, decentralised chat that speaks plain IRC

330 points · 190 comments · davidcollantes

  1. advisedwang · · focus · HN ↗
    > 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.

    1. blamestross · · focus · HN ↗
      Ownership of namespaces is such a hard problem, our society has had to form global organizations and some of our most secure distributed systems to make it happen.

      Working in the p2p space, scalable namespace ownership that doesn't get instantly ruined by perverse incentives is the holy grail. I don't think it is actually tractable in any "central authority free" system. Don't get me started on blockchains that tether names to the most perverse systems available and call it victory.

      1. advisedwang · · focus · HN ↗
        Given that this system already uses DNS for namespacing of user identifiers (via instances), it seems like it could use DNS for namespacing of channels too
        1. blamestross · · focus · HN ↗
          My personal p2p pet project (not ready yet) just accepts namespace chaos bc it doesn&#x27;t consider any existing infrastructure reliable or safe. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;BrendanBenshoof&#x2F;sneakernet" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;BrendanBenshoof&#x2F;sneakernet

          The real problem is that DNS essentially &quot;outs you&quot; as interacting with a particular user. Literally advertises it to your DNS server. It&#x27;s a very unsafe name management solution in a privacy centric system.

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