Subj : Cabal
To   : NuSkooler
From : Oli
Date : Fri Jan 01 2021 19:43:22

NuSkooler wrote (2020-12-31):

 N> Something I've been experimenting with lately is Cabal
 N> (https://cabal.chat), a fully decentralized and encrypted chat platform.

 N> The TL;DR:
 N> * FULLY decentralized: If a node goes away and never comes back, that's
 N> fine. No central "owner".
 N> * Anyone with the proper secret key (cabal://longhashhere) can partipate
 N> in chat. Anyone else is out of luck (e.g. no wire snooping)
 N> * In general, IRC-like
 N> * Existing TUI works great with 80x25/ANSI

 N> What are others thoughts on this? We have IRC (which _can_ be encrypted,
 N> but you need a central server to enforce it), we have MRC (which I love,
 N> and is certainly a bit more *BBS* oriented, but not decentralized or
 N> encrypted).

New chat/messaging systems come and go while the world has settled for slack, whatsapp, wechat, telegram, discord for the next couple of years. No open p2p chat was ever successful and most p2p chats never addressed the problem with power consumption on mobile devices. Is text chat still a thing or is it all video conferences nowadays? ;)

I think the cabal encryption is completely stupid. If you have the key, you have access to all messages in the channel (if any of the participants is still online). Keys/URLs leak easily (someone posts it on twitter, ...). Also nothing special with cabal that hasn't been done with other p2p chat software before (IMO). I also don't understand how Cabal is IRC like. IRC has all kind of permissions and offers public and non-public list of channels. How would you join cabal, if you don't have exchanged a key/URL by other means?

A fully decentralized chat system that works for everyone with e2e encryption and useful features would be nice. I think federated communication systems have failed in one way or another: email, xmpp, fidonet, irc (not really federated), matrix. Unfortunately p2p chat seems to be one experimental implementation after another only few have ever heard of or used it. Most people are happy with the known centralized systems I mentioned above, because they just work (until they don't and then everybody moves on to the next one-to-rule-it-all service). (Telehash (by the creator of XMPP) looked really interesting, but it's missing an implementation and seems to be abandoned).

I would propose extending binkp with a messaging extension, just for the sake of being based on retro technology ;-P

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 * Origin:  (21:3/102)

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