ChuuniIRC is a new approach to social media, built with lessons learned from ActivityPub. Despite its name, ChuuniIRC is much deeper rooted in microblogging than in instant messaging.
Multihoming is the ability for a client to make effective use of multiple instances. ChuuniIRC builds around multihoming to improve moderation and make the network resilient to instance shutdowns.
Through easy discovery of connected accounts (“alts”), moderators can more effectively do common moderation tasks that are notoriously difficult on other federated networks. Additionally, by connecting to multiple instances, should an instance shut down, you don’t lose your access to the network, and it’s all seamless!
Communities have multiple modes of interaction, ranging from an individual participating in multiple, possibly overlapping, communities, up to multiple communities and even groups of communities getting together as a whole.
If community-community interactions are represented by federation, then individual-community interactions are represented by multihoming, and ChuuniIRC supports both.
Unlike, say, Mastodon, ChuuniIRC is structured in such a way that the flagship software is developed by the communities that use it. There is no BDFL, and forking is encouraged.
Consequently, development follows the values of the communities, including features, default filters, easter eggs, etc.
Unlike traditional social media, ChuuniIRC enforces end-to-end encryption of direct messages. ChuuniIRC also has a major advantage over other encrypted networks: thanks to its strong focus on multihoming, it is much more resilient to attacks against the E2EE layer - a single compromised instance can’t redirect the encryption nor cause a denial of service.
ChuuniIRC is not yet ready for a public release. Watch this space! In the mean time, feel free to come by #chuuniirc on libera.chat.