basics

[cblgh]

see cabal-club for the most recent developments of this project

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recently we've seen a deluge of interesting ideas, topics and conversations around the p2p domain. i've been feeling the need for an accessible irc alternative, one that isn't hosted by a for-profit company.

i think making the software to organize ourselves will create the opportunity for a lot of interesting collaborations and birthing of projects

here's what i've been thinking with regard to basic features

• channels
• theming (c.f. @neauoire's cohesive themes for inspiration)
• choo frontend
• introducer peers (tiny http api endpoints, to allow for automatic introductions. self-hosted or on glitch)

using hyperdb we can make use of multi-writing to easily connect many peers together into a cohesive whole.

this has the interesting property that any authorized peer can in turn authorize and add other peers i.e. a kind of viral propagation, anyone in the cabal can add others to the cabal

let's collab on this, and see where we can take it together 👋

prior art

automerge/hypermerge
substack/chatmesh
jimpick/dat-multiwriter-web

[cblgh]

i had some ideas on the starting and joining of a cabal from an event-oriented perspective.
i'll sketch them down below for future reference.

the invite-only flow is easier to implement as a first stop, and the introducer flow might look different depending on how glitch works

basic flows

invite-only (no introducer)

conspirator flow

• create cabal
• get cabal key
• send cabal key to potential, uninitiated conspirators

uninitiated flow

• uninitiated enters cabal key
• uninitiated gets invite key, sends to a conspirator
• conspirator adds invite key
• uninitiated is now authorized, and elevated to conspirator

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introducer

conspirator flow

• create cabal
  • introducer service is started
  • introducer's invite key is added to cabal
  • introducer is now allowed to elevate uninitiated peers to conspirators
• get cabal key

uninitiated flow

• uninitiated enters cabal key
  • invite key is generated and sent to introducer via api
  • introducer adds invite key, uninitiated is elevated to conspirator

[callil]

This is all really great @cblgh - I'm going to work on visualizing this flow through some wireframes. Will also take a stab at some of the high level organization.

I think we should dogfood as fast as possible!
I'm REALLY interested in how we can make the chat as ready to use as possible.

[neauoire]

I've been looking at HyperDB and I don't really understand how I could go about and make a chat system with it. Is there a sort of proof-of-concept code somewhere around?

[cblgh]

@neauoire you can look at chatmesh, which i mentioned under prior art above. otherwise i'm going to write small examples in the same fashion as with cblgh/hypercore-examples but for hyperdb

@callil i completely agree about dogfooding! i was talking with @louiscenter and he brought up the counterpoint that we could also just setup a nice bouncer for irc and have people join that

regardless i think it would be nice to have infrastructure for people to easily setup a distributed slack alternative. it could optionally intertwine with the raspberry pi effort to ensure chat history availability / introducer peers

[louiscenter]

some more prior art: https://github.com/mafintosh/hyperirc

if cabal aims to be a chat client/slack alternative, maybe there's a way of finding a nice way to marry pre-existing protocols that do chat really well (irc, matrix, ssb), and the dat protocol, which is why I found the hyperirc repo above interesting.

I wonder if there are already bouncer like apps floating around on glitch that could be forked in taken in the direction that you're after?

[saranrapjs]

this is a really cool idea. something that chatmesh requires (which, as I understand it, is required by multi-writer hyperdb) is explicit authorization by whoever originates the hyperdb. this means that unless the an already-authorized writer to the hyperdb is available to authorize, peers can't authorize themselves to write to the hyperdb. this might not be a problem for some of the conspirator/uninitiated flows described here, but i'd be curious if there are ways to make hyperdb work more like IRC for certain use cases — e.g. allow any participant in a swarm for a specific public key or cabal (discovery key?) auto-authorize themselves for writing without needing to communicate with an already-authorized writer?

[kodedninja]

Maybe a workaround for that would be a centralized server running somewhere that has write access to hyperdb and you would get access through that.

[cblgh]

@saranrapjs i dug into chatmesh today and i think as long as we have one (or many) bot/service peers running then we can get something more like IRC! (i.e. no explicit authorization needed)
a cabal <->irc bridge, built on hyperirc from above, would also be cool!

(i have a hard time seeing self auto-authorization working without some kind of peer being online, though)

[joehand]

Extremely excited for this!!! 😍

Definitely check out @jimpick's demo on hyperdb! It's not a chat application but should show a good implementation of hyperdb: https://dat-multiwriter-web.glitch.me/.

He should be writing up a blog post on it soon! Related, Jim has thought a lot about auto-authorization as well.

Other random prior art (related to hyperirc):

• chat.datproject.org (source: https://github.com/joehand/hyperirc-web)
• https://github.com/hypermodules/irc.hypermodul.es

[kodedninja]

How would this be structured, by the way?

One archive per channel (dat://channel-1.newcomputers.group) or one archive per channel (dat://cabal.newcomputers.group/channel).

Chatmesh uses the first structure which is a lot more simple to work with, but maybe the second one is better for UX.

[cblgh]

alright, i got the ball rolling! first out is a small introduction to hyperdb that i made to explore what i'll be needing for the backend

check it out at cblgh/hyperdb-examples

@kodedninja many channels per hyperdb! so following your example that would be dat://cabal.newcomputers.group/channel

[kodedninja]

Great!

[cblgh]

oh hey so i've been working on this here and there and have something really basic working

i took a bit of a break to learn streams so that i could work with hyperdb's stream-based methods with minimal headscratching.

right now this a terminal only app, but the structure is such that you can swap out the frontend (currently it's console.log-based with hacky screen-clearing) for a blessed frontend, or a choo app compiled for browsers

[okdistribute]

hey @cblgh , chatmesh doesn't have channels right now but I think it should include them. So you could think of a dat link as an equivalent to a 'server' in IRC or a team in Slack.

[cblgh]

i pushed up the code if anyone wants to have a look