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Parley: Federated, decentralised chat that speaks plain IRC

330 points · 190 comments · davidcollantes

  1. Conlectus · · focus · HN ↗
    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.

    1. dale_glass · · focus · HN ↗
      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.

      1. monkeywork · · focus · HN ↗
        >Unfortunately XMPP is an absolutely terrible protocol

        Can you provide more details here? I've never seen an issue with the protocol at all, more issues with feature difference between servers depending on what they have decided to implement or not.

        1. nunobrito · · focus · HN ↗
          Identities. Creating an identity in XMPP is an absolute mess and requires domains along with approvals. At least in IRC this isn't complicated.

          My own preference goes to NOSTR, just a set of public/private keys as identity and nothing else needed.

          1. sellmesoap · · focus · HN ↗
            Or ANproto <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;anproto.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;anproto.com&#x2F; without the nostr baggage, what little there is.
            1. nunobrito · · focus · HN ↗
              There is zero baggage on NOSTR regarding identities. An npub became the non-ambiguous way to reference anyone regardless of where they are writing from.

              Thank you for the reference to that project called anproto, never had heard of it and I&#x27;m still without understanding what problem it really solves. Seems to encrypt texts but then contains zero outside metadata to route it somewhere. The website is very scarce on details for someone unfamiliar the scuttle-something they mention.

              1. someonebaggy · · focus · HN ↗
                Doesn&#x27;t nostr also forego routing metadata?
                1. nunobrito · · focus · HN ↗
                  NOSTR notes are very flexible. For example you can have the json include metadata which is essential to know where it should be going, or you can encrypt everything and send what looks like &quot;garbage&quot; to an open relay that can only be fetched by anyone with a key.

                  There are dedicated profile notes which define which relays that account&#x2F;identity prefers to send their messages but everything is flexible. It does forego much of the routing metadata, which in my opinion is an obstacle when you don&#x27;t know which stations&#x2F;relays are placed on a given geography but you want the message to &quot;navigate&quot; (sometimes quite literally) to a place&#x2F;region.

                  For that type of things I&#x27;m a biased fan of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xprs.dev" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xprs.dev because it bridges NOSTR identities&#x2F;signing&#x2F;encryption with APRS that can use store&#x2F;forward and the routing follows any possible method include USB drives.

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