Introduction
Contents |
Introducing PSYC
Imagine smartly multicast chat and conferencing, non-proprietary instant messaging, decentralized Social Networking and data sharing. And now imagine all of this rolled into one. PSYC is an open source protocol and technology, bringing the useful and amazing aspects of several technologies, some of which have been proprietary too long, together.
- Strengths of PSYC.
This is just a snapshot of PsycZilla, a particularely colorful PSYC client.
Here's a gallery of other clients: Snapshots.
But looks are only superficial.
The technology and the new concepts are the point about PSYC.
Concepts
The white paper at http://www.psyc.eu/whitepaper/white.en.html (english) and http://www.psyc.eu/whitepaper/white.de.html (deutsch) is probably a good read to get started understanding PSYC. Unfortunately experience has proven that even when people start thinking they understand PSYC, they still only saw the tip of the iceberg. I'm sorry, but PSYC has some very complex aspects which are however necessary to make a world scalable communication system. So whenever you think "Is that it?" it probably wasn't. But don't let that scare you, it is interesting and fun enough to want to dig deeper. And did I say you can always ask? Especially when that psychological effect strikes, that you think you just read something which ruins it all for you: "If it is this it can't be good.." Experience has shown, that also this effect is usually wrong.
- Routing - various distribution and multicast strategies implemented or planned in PSYC using Contexts.
- Why SPAM will have a seriously harder time happening on PSYC.
- PSYC has decentralized privacy-aware trust modeling and social networking functions!
- Presence - the new mathematical presence model and how it works.
- Authentication - how PSYC AUTH works and how it can be applied to HTTP and IRC etc.
- personal nickspaces - why we need uniforms and how we can avoid having to actually see or type them.
- Method Naming - why a _notice is not a _status etc.
- Category:Concept - larger overview of concepts.
- Category:Glossary - overview of technical terms.
Compared to Other Technologies
Understanding PSYC by comparison to other technologies:
- We believe in the scalability of a decentralized messaging system. We started collecting problems of centralistic systems.
- IRC - Lessons learned from the Relay Chat experience, how to keep the good of it and fix the bad.
- Jabber - Why we can't just do it using XMPP and what if we tried to.
- See Comparison for a simple overview of differences and Category:Protocol for further protocols we inspected.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Have you read the whitepaper already? Please do! It's linked further up.
- The FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions, but you knew that).
- Are we ready to Write Applications and Clients using PSYC? Of course!
- See wiki for info on editing and discussing pages on about.psyc.eu
How many people use this stuff?
Something between a hundred and a million, daily. There is an inner core of conscious users - about hundred steady ones, running their own servers (so it is only an estimate) - another thousand of people who drop by occasionally, or maybe more. There have been usage peaks with chat events held by symlynX and a period when BRASnet, an IRC network of a million daily users, was gatewayed into PSYC.
Why is it taking forever for PSYC to arrive?
Are we waiting for Godot? For Sisyphus to stop scaling the mountain? RFC 1324 says on this issue:
It is not expected that any protocol that meets the above demands [described in the RFC] will be either easy to arrive at or easy to implement. Some of the above requirements may seem to be exotic, unnecessary or not worth the effort. After viewing previous conferencing programs and how they work, many short comings can be seen in taking shortcuts.
Please inspect our Roadmap. Please volunteer to help us achieve our goals collectively.
