Parley: Federated IRC-compatible decentralized chat
Original: Parley: Federated, decentralised chat that speaks plain IRC
Why This Matters
Federation fixes like this are table stakes for IRC-based decentralized chat to be usable at scale.
Parley is an open-source, federated chat server built on IRC, letting users communicate as user@domain across self-hosted instances using any standard IRC client like irssi. A recent fix ensures channel mentions route notifications only to the specific user intended, not all users sharing the same nick across instances.
Parley is a self-hostable, federated chat system that uses plain IRC as its wire protocol. Users are addressed as user@domain — for example, bob@foo.com — and can talk to anyone on any participating instance using standard IRC clients. The project is written in Go and is actively developed on git.mills.io.
The most recent commit (PR #39) patches a notification bug: when multiple instances each hosted a user named 'bob', a channel mention like 'bob: lunch?' would push a notification to every bob across the federation, not just the intended recipient. The fix introduces smarter mention parsing — a bare 'bob' now refers to the bob on the sender's own instance, while 'bob:bar.com' specifically targets bar.com's bob. A new integration test, TestOnlyTheBobThatWasMeantIsPushed, links two instances and verifies five message variants each push to exactly one recipient. The fix was co-authored with Claude Code and passes the full test suite including race detection.