Comm

introducing Comm, a new kind of messaging app. we extend Signal-style encryption with a federation layer

Comm supports two kinds of chats:
1. Signal-style E2EE group chats & DMs
2. chat communities hosted on federated keyservers (like a modern IRC)

where Discord is chaotic and messy, Comm communities are organized and built for async

we're using Farcaster to bootstrap not just our social graph, but also our interest graph. when you log in with Farcaster, we'll automatically add you to communities based on the channels you follow

check it out: https://comm.app/download

founder of @comm.eth
open source / build in public

1. Signal-style E2EE group chats & DMs use a RabbitMQ-based message broker we've written called Tunnelbroker: https://github.com/CommE2E/comm/tree/master/services/tunnelbroker
2. Chat communities hosted on federated keyservers use Redis

big fans of XMTP, but we decided against that protocol when we started building E2EE because at the time they were using bad encryption (single shared symmetric key rather than eg. Double Ratchet; had no forward secrecy)

a couple months ago XMTP massively upgraded their E2EE to be based on MLS, but at that point we had already implemented most of our E2EE stack based on Olm and weren't able to prioritize a rewrite

Seems neat, how's it doing transport? Is it using XMTP or similar?

so our Electron apps (macOS & Windows) are just shells around our web app (https://web.comm.app)

the only thing they implement is native OS notifications, which are proprietary for both macOS & Windows

if you don't care about that, then one option is to use Chromium on Linux to turn https://web.comm.app into an app

✳︎ design engineer → @ponder 
✳︎ explorer of humanism • petrolhead/gearhead
✳︎ React/SwiftUI
✳︎ bento.me/matthew

nothing is locked down, but custom clients can be built with or without having your own keyserver

keyservers are part of the protocol in a similar way to Farcaster hubs, except we want average users to know them

whitepaper coming soon!

does having own keyservers allow for custom clients using your own tech/tooling/sdk, or is it locked down?

Commendable effort. Always tough to grow a new chat app but the right communities will drive it forward. 

Would love to see some sort of “roundup” feature that quickly summarizes what I missed from larger chats/channels.

Interesting! I like E2E encyption. Any plans for a web version?

here's my user test:

Interesting! I like E2E encyption. Any plans for a web version?

here's my user test:

https://news.pub/?try=https://www.youtube.com/embed/drYSpF2pBsM?si=k8Q3CEOhEFuYVzpS

No Android APK. No F-Droid. No Linux.

Your app is not private

I’m stuck here. I also had to connect Farcaster thrice.

Very cool. Love the use of Farcaster for bootstrapping the graph.
That being said, I thought one of the lessons of web2 was that People Don't Want to Run Servers™, but this relies on a large network of keyservers run by individuals. How is that part of the network bootstrapped?

a calendar for every chat is a big unlock idea. this looks great!

Interesting. Other than the Farcaster integration, what are the main differences from Matrix?