parley

Parley is a chat network with no centre. Every person or team runs a small instance for their own domain, instances find each other through DNS and signed identity documents, and the whole federated network is presented to ordinary IRC clients - no plugins, no bridges.

Identities look like email. Ours are <nick>@mauve.haus. To reach someone elsewhere you type their qualified nick - /msg alice:example.com hi - and the two instances link up on the spot, even if they have never heard of each other before.

This is a different network to irc, not a replacement for it - that one is a classic standalone IRC server, this one federates.

details

• Connect: parley.mauve.haus over TLS on port 6698. Not 6697 - that port belongs to irc.
• Accounts: sign in at the web interface with your mauveAUTH account, then mint an IRC token on your settings page and use it as your client's password.
• Channels: #name is global and replicated across every linked instance; &name is local and never leaves this one. &mauve.haus is the house channel - local only, so nothing said there federates.
• Addressing: two notations, and they are not interchangeable. alice@example.com is an address - how an identity is written, like email. alice:example.com is the qualified nick, and it is what you actually type: /msg alice:example.com, tab-complete, /whois, /ban. People on this instance show as a bare nick; everyone else carries their instance after the colon. A nick containing @ would collide with IRC's own nick!user@host grammar, which is why the typed form uses a colon.
• Scrollback: history follows the account rather than the client, so marking a channel read on your phone clears it on your desktop.
• Web client: The Lounge works here too - add it as a network on port 6698.