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

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

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