aspect

aspect

A better messaging and chat protocol. Building it the right way.

rough design doc

Rough roadmap

These are handwavy milestones that I expect to change.

Phase 1

• Prototype device identity system
• Basic MLS group setup/teardown
• Support adding/removing devices
• ZMQ or AMQP channel message streams

Phase 2

• Protocol cleanup
• Properly authenticate user device identity graph
• Proper device attestation for homeservers
• Experiment with roaming identities?
• Replace transport auth with better system
• Homeserver push events to change group membership (use OpenMLS support for this)
• More sophisticated message structure and local channel state
• Prototype spaces?
• More homeserver administrative actions

Phase 3

• More thorough spaces impl
• Invites
• Persistent channel data store (for custom emotes, stickers, etc.)

Known issues

Keeping this list here so that I remember what I'm doing.

• No transport encryption, homeserver user creds are in plaintext.
• User authentication is shaky, should add some kind of session authentication to avoid resending creds and stuff.
• No connection pooling or automatic reconnect to homeservers.
• Password hashing round count is way too high for debug builds, takes 5+ seconds.
• Lots of ORM queries have // TODOs on them because we query more columns than we need to, that could be reduced.
• Lots of queries could be made into JOINs but I don't know how to express that to SeaORM correctly.
• Lots of Codec serialization is "self-documenting" in the bad way (the source code is the only documentation), switch to using Stencil when it's mature enough.