(Old version, deutsche Fassung)

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.

Concepts

We are currently working on a new specification which includes new features and various changes. Nonetheless, the concepts explained in the white paper for the old version still apply and can help you a great deal in grasping the involved complexities. You can find it at http://www.psyc.eu/whitepaper/white.en.html (english) and http://www.psyc.eu/whitepaper/white.de.html (deutsch).

Unfortunately experience has proven that, even when people start thinking they understand PSYC, they still only saw the tip of the iceberg. We're 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 enough to want to dig deeper. And 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.." You might just be missing a piece of the puzzle in that case, too.

The following links are all about the old specification. For material on the new specification, have a look at its overview page.

• 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?
• 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
• Deutschsprachige: Fragen & Antworten.
• Other questions.