Cabal: A peer-to-peer, off-grid, community-first, hackable chat platform

Interesting project. How does it compare to Briar https://briarproject.org/ ?

Think of it this way, if 4chan wasn’t a website, no one would allow it to exist.

Web technology has a certain responsibility, so I think all the alternative communication tech is in response to the theme of this week.

My thoughts exactly, the Donald Chumps will take this up. Good news: Massive influx of users. Bad news: It's all American Fascists looking to hold hands. Saving grace is most are probably too stupid to read hacker news.

Briar only works on Android so it's inherently flawed.

Of course, Cabal being written in javascript is also a major minus. As an oldschool Unix hacker, I don't really get the node.js fixation for command line tools. It's a certainty that they'll never be used by a significant chunk of knowledgeable, expert Unix users that want nothing to do with node.

Finally, there is no protocol documentation anywhere that I can see. This is yet another way that these modern tools fail spectacularly. In the golden age of the Internet, published protocol documentation that allowed for multiple clients to be developed was the norm rather than the exception. Which led to robust, long living protocols and services (e.g. IRC).

Even though we're being drowned in apps, this isn't happening today and we're worse off for it.

The name clash with Haskell's build tool is unfortunate...