Parley wants decentralized chat to feel like plain old IRC
A new Hacker News thread is pointing people at Parley, a proof-of-concept chat network where user@domain identities talk through ordinary IRC clients.
What happened
Parley describes itself as "federated, decentralised chat that speaks plain IRC." The project says each person or team can run a small instance for their own domain, then talk to other domains from stock IRC clients such as irssi, WeeChat, or Textual.
The project appeared on Hacker News on September 28, bringing fresh attention to an old-school idea with a modern federation layer: keep the client experience familiar, but let the network discover peers through DNS and well-known identity documents.
The geeky bit
Parley identities look like email addresses. The README gives examples such as alice@foo.com and bob@bar.com, with one user able to message the other even if their instances have not met before.
Under the hood, the project says it uses DNS SRV records, /.well-known/parley/ documents, ed25519 keys, signed HTTPS federation, SQLite history, and IRCv3 features including server-time, message-tags, echo-message, multi-prefix, and CHATHISTORY.
Quick takeaways
- The README labels Parley a working proof of concept and says it is "not hardened yet."
- Global
#channelscan replicate across linked instances, while local&channelsstay on one instance. - The project is MIT licensed and has Docker and two-instance demo instructions for people who want to test it.