Parley
git.mills.io- Category
- Social
- Rank
- No. 4069Tools index
Previous survey · No. 3897 ·
- Type
- APP
- Use case
- Productivity & Collaboration
- Date
About
Parley is a federated, decentralized chat server that speaks plain IRC, letting anyone run an instance for their own domain and message others as user@domain from irssi or any standard IRC client. It's built and maintained with an accompanying protocol specification and test suite, with recent work fixing how mention notifications are routed across federated instances that share a nickname.
At a glance
Parley is a federated chat server that works with IRC clients and gives accounts identities on their own domains. It is worth investigating if a small community wants to run its own instance and link selectively with others.
Good fit
Operators comfortable managing an IRC service for a few communities that trust one another.
Consider something else when
Choose another chat system if end-to-end encryption or consistent moderation across a large network is essential.
Start here
Read the federation model, then use two test instances with a harmless channel and a standard IRC client. Check which messages each instance sees before inviting anyone.
Cost and requirements
MIT-licensed Go project. Running an instance requires a server and an IRC client for chatting.
Limits to know
Linked instances can see different portions of a channel when links are incomplete. The project documents public feeds and lists per-user end-to-end encryption as future work.
Sources checked 2026-11-05. Source-based assessment.
Why it made the leaderboard
Lets you self-host a federated chat instance reachable from any standard IRC client, bridging decentralized federation with a protocol millions of existing tools already speak.
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Editorially curated, with community endorsements as a secondary signal. Corrections welcome.