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.
altilunium•1h ago
can any layman user simply use it without running their own instance?
davidcollantes•1h ago
Yes, you will need to know someone running an instance to create an account for you.
grim_io•45m ago
So... no? :)
jagged-chisel•37m ago
Yes, you can try it without running your own instance. You will need to use someone else's instance.
NoboruWataya•3m ago
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.)
davidcollantes•43m 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.
myaccountonhn•28m ago
I quite like this, but it feels like spam could quickly become a concern.
davidcollantes•24m ago
That is always a concern, yes. You can block users, and entire instances, that spam.
shreddit•26m 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…
yvdriess•22m 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•4m 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.
padolsey•24m ago
Both cool and worryingly convenient for the botswarms we've been warned of...
okwhateverdude•21m ago
lol, so XMPP, but instead of XML, it is IRC. Alright, I dig it.
aunderscored•3m 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.
davidcollantes•1h ago
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.
altilunium•1h ago
davidcollantes•1h ago
grim_io•45m ago
jagged-chisel•37m ago
NoboruWataya•3m ago
(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.)
davidcollantes•43m ago