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

cabal.chat

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

#31

Post by Shared404 »

efdee wrote: post #21
creamytaco wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

No knowledgeable, expert Unix user I know brushes a Node program aside just because it is Node.

> knowledgeable, expert Unix user

I wouldn't describe myself as that, but I think I'm a little bit past noob at this point.

I don't "brush aside" a program because it's node, but it's definitely a strike against it. I don't like dealing with the massive amount of dependencies that always seems to follow along with it.

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

#32

Post by scrps »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #25
colesantiago wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

open source software at this point is just a pawn for being misused by extremists. someone once said 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions' or something like that. anyway, i'll get some friends on there and organise a a̶t̶t̶a̶c̶k̶ party.

> open source software at this point is just a pawn for being misused by extremists. This comment makes me question if you know what open source software is.

I wonder if this (baffling) line of reasoning will become the new "Open Source/FOSS is Communism" of the late '90s early '00s...

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

#33

Post by wizzwizz4 »

cpach wrote: post #26
tomcam wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which ones should be eliminated?

Evolution will take care of that. A lot of them will simply fizzle out.

Beware evolution's pruning. It optimises for survival (and as a consequence, reproduction and ruthlessness), which is often at odds with what people value.

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

#34

Post by deeviant »

bastard_op wrote: post #6
whoknew1122 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not a coincidence that this gets posted with no context the day that Parler gets kicked off AWS. I presume it's someone trying to offer Cabal as a Parler alternative.

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.

Don't be so sure. Trump-Qanon supporters seem to be pretty common around here. They were very active in the "Trump banned from twitter" post.

Doesn't surprise me as (Trump|QAnon)'ism seems to be very inviting to the tech bro culture.

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

#35

Post by supermatt »

How does peer discovery work? Im assuming there must be some central server(s) to handle the bootstrap? I had a quick scan through the github projects, but couldnt see any high level documentation explaining the architecture. Would appreciate some insight!

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

#36

Post by vertis »

Shared404 wrote: post #31
efdee wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No knowledgeable, expert Unix user I know brushes a Node program aside just because it is Node.

> knowledgeable, expert Unix user I wouldn't describe myself as that, but I think I'm a little bit past noob at this point. I don't "brush aside" a program because it's node, but it's definitely a strike against it. I don't like dealing with the massive amount of dependencies that always seems to follow along with it.

No post body was provided.

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

#37

Post by colesantiago »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #25
colesantiago wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

open source software at this point is just a pawn for being misused by extremists. someone once said 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions' or something like that. anyway, i'll get some friends on there and organise a a̶t̶t̶a̶c̶k̶ party.

> open source software at this point is just a pawn for being misused by extremists. This comment makes me question if you know what open source software is.

1. get banned from platform.

2. move to another platform.

3. spew shit.

4. go to step 1.

If the above happens for a certain amount of time, think about what the extremists are going to use when they finally realise they need to "build their own" stuff?

The next one after Mastodon will probably be Matrix and by then it's already too late.

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

#38

Post by jakswa »

supermatt wrote: post #35

How does peer discovery work? Im assuming there must be some central server(s) to handle the bootstrap? I had a quick scan through the github projects, but couldnt see any high level documentation explaining the architecture. Would appreciate some insight!

"Currently searches across and advertises on the Bittorrent DHT, centralized DNS servers and Multicast DNS simultaneously."

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

#39

Post by wizzwizz4 »

efdee wrote: post #21
creamytaco wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

No knowledgeable, expert Unix user I know brushes a Node program aside just because it is Node.

I don't brush aside Node programs just because they're Node. I brush them aside because they usually drag in a few MB of dependencies, and melt my (mid-level) computer with compilation (often OOM-killing everything else I'm doing on the machine, before dying to the OOM-killer itself) – but for all that, I then need to keep the entire thing on my hard drive because the compilation was mere caching, and hasn't given me an executable; I've still got the runtime overhead of Node, and everything that comes with it.

There are a few Python programs I also brush aside for this reason, though substantially fewer. Virtually every Node project I've seen is a spidery mess of dependencies bringing in dependencies bringing in yet more un-auditable dependencies; the worst Python tends to get is Tensorflow, and it's ready to run immediately (compiling C modules aside – though pip does that at installation time, making that a one-time annoyance for all but obscure C packages).

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

#40

Post by nanomonkey »

supermatt wrote: post #35

How does peer discovery work? Im assuming there must be some central server(s) to handle the bootstrap? I had a quick scan through the github projects, but couldnt see any high level documentation explaining the architecture. Would appreciate some insight!

It's built on the Hypercore Protocol [0](previously known as DAT), so I would assume DHT (Distributed Hash Tables).

[0]https://hypercore-protocol.org/

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