I’ve been meaning to add a chat room to this blog for a long time in order to enable real-time communication between me and my readers. Ideally, it would be decentralized, censorship-resistant, and accessible via Tor while still providing users with the ability to filter out messages that they don’t want to see. Some kind of way to prevent scammers from impersonating me without having to post my public PGP key every time I write a response would also be a welcome addition. Unfortunately, these requirements greatly limit my options.

There’s a very interesting project called Chitchatter which ticks some of these boxes. It’s open source, decentralized, peer-to-peer, and censorship-resistant. There is no account registration – anyone can connect with anyone else by simply specifying a previously agreed-upon URL (for public chat rooms) or a URL and password (for private chat rooms). For example, here is a chat room that I “created” for this website:

https://chitchatter.im/public/alexology

(Second/alternative room: https://chitchatter.im/public/Alexology)

Unfortunately, it uses WebRTC which isn’t supported by Tor. It also allocates usernames randomly and has no way for users to filter out spammers and trolls – if a chat room becomes inundated with spambots for example then its creator advises you to pack up everything, move to a new URL, and hope that the spambots stay one step behind. Since there’s no way to prove who is who, if someone there claims to be me then you should automatically assume that they are an imposter.

There’s another chat room on the dark web called Ableonion (link requires Tor Browser to access). I find its way of doing things to be quite neat. There is a CAPTCHA which presumably filters out most bots but some still get through. Instead of relying on a centralized moderation team however, you can choose to mute anyone (or any bot) that you don’t want to see by simply entering /ignore in the text field followed by a space and then their username which will make all of their previous and future messages disappear from your view.

If you know of any other options that fulfill these requirements then feel free to share them in the comments. Until I can find something better, this will remain as the “official” unofficial chat room for Alexology – just don’t forget the aforementioned warning in bold.