8 ms·

Show HN: Toc Messenger – A distributed messaging app that syncs across devices

41 points by lewisl9029 11y ago

lewisl9029 11y ago
Hi HN, Toc is a project I've been working on for more than a year now. I'd love to hear what you guys think about it. =) Toc is a proof-of-concept distributed messaging app designed from the ground up to support user data synchronization for use across multiple devices. It uses Telehash for its messaging stack, and is built on top of an Om-inspired architecture oriented around a central app state tree that gets encrypted using a custom encryption layer for persistence locally, and then synchronized seamlessly between devices using remoteStorage. Originally, Toc started as our group's fourth year Computer Engineering design project at the University of Waterloo. After we graduated in May, I wanted to polish it up a bit before releasing, but evidently went a bit overboard and ended up working on it for another six months (albeit with a healthy dose of procrastination sprinkled throughout that period). Toc is only a proof-of-concept, and has a list of awful issues that makes it rather unsuitable for long term general use. However, I'm hoping that by releasing Toc, we can bring more attention to the awesome technologies for building great decentralized applications that Toc uses, and inspire more developers to take another serious look at building distributed apps, as I hope we have demonstrated with Toc that a decentralized app can in fact have great UX if you design your apps with UX in mind from the start. With that said, I am now officially looking for work. If you have any openings for a ClojureScript frontend project, or a React project that makes heavy use of functional techniques and immutable data, I'd love to hear about it. You can reach me through the email on my GitHub profile[1], HN profile[2] or through my Toc account[3]. ;) (disclaimer: that last option might not be completely reliable) [1] https://github.com/lewisl9029 https://github.com/lewisl9029 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lewisl9029 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lewisl9029 [3] http://toc.im/?inviteid=9b0d50b86dd596aa8c7a94bd116c2ed4a24ffb0f2d88d44231d3747f655fb27a http://toc.im/?inviteid=9b0d50b86dd596aa8c7a94bd116c2ed4a24f...
- gobengo 11y ago
  Dude. Nice. Is this the most advanced GUI Telehash Client?
  - lewisl9029 11y ago
    Glad you like it! Not sure about whether it's the most advanced... Toc's feature set is pretty sparse (text chat only) considering what Telehash is capable of. We do hope it's the most user friendly one though. =)
humbleMouse 11y ago
Looks pretty sweet, going to have to give this a look.
Nilzor 11y ago
Interesting. How does this scale? Any idea on how the clients world perform with say, 10000 users logged in?
- lewisl9029 11y ago
  The seed server I'm running probably can't handle all of them doing bootstrapping at the same time, but once they're bootstrapped and have their own lookup tables stored locally, theoretically it should scale much better than a traditional centralized app since individual messages and status updates won't need to be coordinated through any single server. Of course, the Telehash version I'm using is very old and unsupported, so there's no guarantee that its integrated DHT can handle any significant scale.
trengrj 11y ago
As mentioned in the readme, the name is really unfortunate given Tox exists.
dksidana 11y ago
Have you planned for group chat as well ?
- lewisl9029 11y ago
  Yep I did plan for it. All messages in the app are sent through channels that support an arbitrary number of recipients. That arbitrary number just happens to be always set to 1 at the moment. A naive group chat implementation (i.e. an inefficient one where every participant sends each message to every other participant until they receive it) should be very doable, but I decided against implementing it for the release because it'd add quite a bit more complexity and would be rather tedious to test.
philprx 11y ago
Great. However... Your name is way too close to Tor Messenger which last release a few days ago shows very good progress. Why this matters? Your project states that it's not secure. Their project aims at being secure. One person wanting security may inadvertently install your and end up being in a less secure state as what he would get with Tor Messenger. Changing names following name space collision is no big deal... At the beginning ;) When your name is well known it's a total different matter.
z3t4 11y ago
Can I talk to someone not on my seed server?
- lewisl9029 11y ago
  Probably not, unless the DHTs the two of you belong to are connected somehow. For example, if the other person's seed server uses your seed server as a bootstrapping server.

41 points by lewisl9029 11y ago

Hi HN, Toc is a project I've been working on for more than a year now. I'd love to hear what you guys think about it. =) Toc is a proof-of-concept distributed messaging app designed from the ground up to support user data synchronization for use across multiple devices. It uses Telehash for its messaging stack, and is built on top of an Om-inspired architecture oriented around a central app state tree that gets encrypted using a custom encryption layer for persistence locally, and then synchronized seamlessly between devices using remoteStorage. Originally, Toc started as our group's fourth year Computer Engineering design project at the University of Waterloo. After we graduated in May, I wanted to polish it up a bit before releasing, but evidently went a bit overboard and ended up working on it for another six months (albeit with a healthy dose of procrastination sprinkled throughout that period). Toc is only a proof-of-concept, and has a list of awful issues that makes it rather unsuitable for long term general use. However, I'm hoping that by releasing Toc, we can bring more attention to the awesome technologies for building great decentralized applications that Toc uses, and inspire more developers to take another serious look at building distributed apps, as I hope we have demonstrated with Toc that a decentralized app can in fact have great UX if you design your apps with UX in mind from the start. With that said, I am now officially looking for work. If you have any openings for a ClojureScript frontend project, or a React project that makes heavy use of functional techniques and immutable data, I'd love to hear about it. You can reach me through the email on my GitHub profile[1], HN profile[2] or through my Toc account[3]. ;) (disclaimer: that last option might not be completely reliable) [1] https://github.com/lewisl9029 https://github.com/lewisl9029 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lewisl9029 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lewisl9029 [3] http://toc.im/?inviteid=9b0d50b86dd596aa8c7a94bd116c2ed4a24ffb0f2d88d44231d3747f655fb27a http://toc.im/?inviteid=9b0d50b86dd596aa8c7a94bd116c2ed4a24f...

gobengo 11y ago
Dude. Nice. Is this the most advanced GUI Telehash Client?
- lewisl9029 11y ago
  Glad you like it! Not sure about whether it's the most advanced... Toc's feature set is pretty sparse (text chat only) considering what Telehash is capable of. We do hope it's the most user friendly one though. =)

humbleMouse 11y ago

Looks pretty sweet, going to have to give this a look.

Nilzor 11y ago

Interesting. How does this scale? Any idea on how the clients world perform with say, 10000 users logged in?

lewisl9029 11y ago
The seed server I'm running probably can't handle all of them doing bootstrapping at the same time, but once they're bootstrapped and have their own lookup tables stored locally, theoretically it should scale much better than a traditional centralized app since individual messages and status updates won't need to be coordinated through any single server. Of course, the Telehash version I'm using is very old and unsupported, so there's no guarantee that its integrated DHT can handle any significant scale.

trengrj 11y ago

As mentioned in the readme, the name is really unfortunate given Tox exists.

dksidana 11y ago

Have you planned for group chat as well ?

lewisl9029 11y ago
Yep I did plan for it. All messages in the app are sent through channels that support an arbitrary number of recipients. That arbitrary number just happens to be always set to 1 at the moment. A naive group chat implementation (i.e. an inefficient one where every participant sends each message to every other participant until they receive it) should be very doable, but I decided against implementing it for the release because it'd add quite a bit more complexity and would be rather tedious to test.

philprx 11y ago

Great. However... Your name is way too close to Tor Messenger which last release a few days ago shows very good progress. Why this matters? Your project states that it's not secure. Their project aims at being secure. One person wanting security may inadvertently install your and end up being in a less secure state as what he would get with Tor Messenger. Changing names following name space collision is no big deal... At the beginning ;) When your name is well known it's a total different matter.

z3t4 11y ago

Can I talk to someone not on my seed server?

lewisl9029 11y ago
Probably not, unless the DHTs the two of you belong to are connected somehow. For example, if the other person's seed server uses your seed server as a bootstrapping server.