Parley: Federated, Decentralised Chat that speaks plain IRC

Parley is a decentralized, federated communication system designed to be compatible with standard IRC. Instead of a central server, individuals or organizations host their own instances tied to their specific domains.

🌐 Core Architecture & Identity

Parley allows you to interact with the network using any traditional IRC client (such as irssi, WeeChat, or Textual) without needing additional plugins.

How it works:

1. Discovery: Instances locate one another via DNS and "well-known" identity documents.
2. Transport: Messages are signed and exchanged over HTTPS.
3. Addressing: User identities follow an email-like format: user@domain.

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🛠 Technical Update: Refining Mention Notifications (#39)

A recent update addressed a bug where notifications were being pushed to too many users when multiple people shared the same nickname across different instances.

The Problem

Previously, the namesAccount function triggered a mention whenever a nickname appeared as a standalone word (since colons are treated as word boundaries).

Scenario: If bob exists on both foo.com and bar.com in the same room:

• A message like bob:bar.com: lunch? sent from foo.com would notify both Bobs.
• A simple bob: lunch? sent from bar.com would also notify the Bob on foo.com.

Because the raw text is federated exactly as typed, every instance containing a "bob" would trigger a push notification.

The Solution

The logic for identifying a mention has been updated to match how the sender actually perceives the user (R189):

• Qualified Names: bob:bar.com (similar to bob@bar.com) always refers specifically to the Bob on bar.com.
• Bare Nicks: A plain bob now only refers to the Bob on the sender's own instance. It only triggers a local account mention if the sender is also local.
• Filtering: Strings like bar inside alice:bar.com are ignored.
• Validation: Only domains belonging to the local instance or a known peer are considered valid.

Old Logic: Any "bob" = All Bobs notified $\rightarrow$ New Logic: $\text{Mention} \implies \text{Specific Identity}$

This ensures that strings like bob:D or bob:10 still correctly resolve to "bob" while preventing cross-instance notification spam.

Implementation Details

• The pushConsidered function now references s.peers under the existing s.mu lock.
• Protocol Changes: Updated parley.bt with a NAMES [read-as-the-sender-was-shown-them] node under PUSH [considered] and updated docs/PROTOCOL.md.

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✅ Verification & Testing

The following checks were performed to ensure stability:

• make test passed successfully.
• Race condition check (-race) passed.
• Integration test TestOnlyTheBobThatWasMeantIsPushed passed 10 consecutive iterations.
• bte check parley.bt returned 0 errors.
• bte fmt confirmed no formatting changes needed.
• demo/demo.sh (Skipped: Docker unavailable in current environment).

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📈 Recent Project Activity

The project continues to evolve with various improvements across the stack:

For more details, explore the source code or check the main branch.