The protocol itself isn’t tied to GitHub and works with any Git remote.
If GitHub ever decided this wasn’t an acceptable use case, swapping the remote would be trivial.
Not to say you couldn't add a generic git protocol to this, just that that's not being done here.
> If GitHub ever decided this wasn’t an acceptable use case, swapping the remote would be trivial.
Nope.
From the README:
"GitHub is the only working write provider right now. GitLab, GitVerse, Gitea, Forgejo, and other git hosts are protocol targets for future adapters. Today they are not finished write adapters."
That might just be an aesthetic choice on my part, but I often find that I am able to implement all the features I need in surprisingly few lines of code. e.g. the first version of my LLM UI was 200 lines and quite usable for my purposes.
And my OpenClaw clone was 50 lines. Just a Telegram wrapper around Claude, but turns out that's all I needed.[0]
Also no dependencies, frameworks, libaries etc. Not a hard rule, but I find that they add negative value about 90% of the time, at least at my scale.
There are dozens of us! :)
[0] Of course, "Claude Code" isn't 50 lines. Except, it turns out you can replace it in about 50 lines. From the SWE-bench folks: https://minimal-agent.com/
To this I added the missing outer loop (so it's actually an agent a human can use) and vendored in a microscopic llm lib (yay no deps). https://gist.github.com/a-n-d-a-i/bd50aaa4bdb15f9a4cc8176ee3...
- you get a slower first load (cannot progressively fetch resources as they're needed) - can't reuse a stylesheet, script or image on a different page (each has to have their own copy) - can't cache commonly used files - can't make granular changes to specific parts of the code. user has to reload everything each time. - can't set a proper content security policy
And many more! It's cool for a tiny demo but for anything serious you wouldn't want a single (extremely ugly) HTML file.
But what if that's exactly what I want to do?
[1]: https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/patching#f...
Claude loves this dumb word "burn". Recently it even said "burn a TOTP" as if they are finite.
To that end, requiring the use of GitHub for your application to work is a dead end.
"Macaroni Messenger is a distributed messaging system"
No.
"The backend does not exist."
Unless by "backend" you mean the underlying infrastructure and server logic you've made the clients depend on for the exchange of messages to happen.
The idea isn’t that transport magically disappears. The idea is that users don’t have to deploy, operate, pay for, or even think about transport.
GitHub happens to provide one out of the box, which makes the proof of concept extremely easy to try.
If I need to run databases, message brokers, servers and monitoring just to send my mom “please cook macaroni”, I’ve already lost interest.
Macaroni Messenger is not a joke. It simply refuses to complicate solutions unnecessarily.
That's why some technical decisions might look like a joke.
Sometimes it really is a joke. But most of the time, it's just the simplest working option.
A messenger file with hardcoded settings and a hardcoded PGP key, stored on a USB stick.
You send a message.
Then you physically destroy the USB stick.
The client, the key, and the configuration are gone.
At some point the joke starts looking suspiciously like a dead-drop communication protocol.
How do you like that, FBI?
Not a problem if you're deploying a single file
ventana•1h ago
[1]: https://github.com/vanyapr/makaroshki/blob/main/PHILOSOPHY.m...
[2]: https://github-com.translate.goog/vanyapr/makaroshki/blob/ma... (Google Translate)
ivvve•54m ago
https://pastebin.com/raw/EPtJM5Dp
andai•48m ago
Klaster_1•39m ago
This is talking politics without talking politics. The project literally attempts to circumvent russian censorship restrictions and their spirit. This is either a joke the file talks about or naive CYA.
Cool project nevertheless, I like idea of an utility SPA distributed as bare HTML file that doesn't even require a web server.
ventana•7m ago
As a result, a highly technical person might work on a very complex solution to circumvent the restrictions but will declare (and probably even truly believe) that they are not making a political statement – as opposed to, for example, attending a protest, which is definitely considered a political action, or supporting a politician.