tl;dr: Parley is a federated chat server that lets any standard IRC client (irssi, WeeChat, etc.) participate in a decentralized network without plugins. Each domain runs its own instance, identities look like email addresses (alice@foo.com), and instances discover each other via DNS SRV records and well-known documents, then exchange ed25519-signed messages over HTTPS. It's a working proof of concept with features like CHATHISTORY, SSO/OIDC, automatic peering, and SQLite-backed searchable history, though it lacks end-to-end encryption, channel operators, and per-user keys.