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

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

#91

Post by h2odragon »

deeviant wrote: post #34
bastard_op wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does "Free speech applies to Qanaon supporters as much as it does to me and thee." make me a Qanon supporter?

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

#92

Post by tachyonbeam »

creamytaco wrote: post #8
yamrzou wrote: post #2

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

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…

> I don't really get the node.js fixation for command line tools.

It's simply because most developers are web developers. They use the programming language and tooling they're familiar with. I do also wish that there wasn't so much of a move to webify everything, particularly since web dev is so prone to constantly changing fads and dependency sprawl. It tends to lead to code/software that breaks all the time.

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

#93

Post by tachyonbeam »

orblivion wrote: post #81
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I picked up The Selfish Gene because I was hoping to figure out how JavaScript got so popular.

It got so popular because it was the only available language to do web scripting. It's not that complicated. It's easy to "win" when no competition is allowed. You can argue that there's CoffeeScript, etc, but every other language is still a second-class citizen in the web ecosystem. WebAssembly may change that once it's stable and mature enough, though again, you have the problem that the DOM APIs were designed for JavaScript, which will create an impedance mismatch with other languages.

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

#95

Post by mempko »

snvzz wrote: post #89

No full forward secrecy. >All traffic is encrypted using a symmetric key, meaning that anybody who has the cabal://abcdef key can read cabal network traffic. If you're even considering this, look at https://tox.chat/ instead. That one's been around for a while (thus mature) and actually has full forward secrecy.

Problem with forward secrecy is that it doesn't really work well for a use case like cabal. You want to be able to join a cabal and read all the past conversations.

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

#96

Post by WClayFerguson »

I've developed a great social media system that's basically a centralized system, although I added Fediverse capability to it recently. It's here: https://quanta.wiki.

I'm looking for a way to leverage Quanta's power on top of some kind of true peer-to-peer architecture to make it censorship resistant, because BigTech has just now gone nuclear in their censorship efforts.

So I'm currently trying to find the right peer-to-peer (won't be ActivityPub) infrastructure, to let Quanta instances network better.

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

#98

Post by WClayFerguson »

qorrect wrote: post #11

I still don't know what's wrong with IRC.

Does IRC have "conversation threads?" To me a conversation thread necessarily entails a hierarchical chain of posts and the replies to those posts as "child nodes". All conversations are inherently "tree structures" if done right, imo.

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

#99

Post by Multicomp »

snvzz wrote: post #89

No full forward secrecy. >All traffic is encrypted using a symmetric key, meaning that anybody who has the cabal://abcdef key can read cabal network traffic. If you're even considering this, look at https://tox.chat/ instead. That one's been around for a while (thus mature) and actually has full forward secrecy.

(never tried cabal, it could be worse)

tox was accused of having a poor crypto implementation / playing silly buggers with libsodium. I've tried it on android, works ok but most apps at the time seemed older. not sure where tox stands re community liveliness but its certainly a good start on p2p messaging, my claims notwitshtanding.

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

#100

Post by antris »

WClayFerguson wrote: post #96

I've developed a great social media system that's basically a centralized system, although I added Fediverse capability to it recently. It's here: https://quanta.wiki . I'm looking for a way to leverage Quanta's power on top of some kind of true peer-to-peer architecture to make it censorship resistant, because BigTech has just now gone nuclear in their censorship efforts. So I'm currently trying to find the right pe…

>BigTech has just now gone nuclear in their censorship efforts

Who's being censored? Twitter, Facebook etc. are private platforms and they've been banning users who break their TOS throughout their histories.

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