Sting Chat is something the PeakD team has been working on for months, among other things, for their Peak Open projects that are supported by the DHF.
While they mentioned working on Sting Chat a long time ago, the actual launch of the alpha version of the project yesterday took many by surprise.
That's the normal way the PeakD team likes to do things, from what we could have noticed over time. Little to no hype, and, almost out of the blue, something very cool is added to their projects.
I am not an active chit-chatter in discord (or other chatting apps), but I do use it to search for information I need or to report issues I find. Since both of these use cases are Hive related, I find a Hive-centric chat app much better, particularly since it will have great perspectives to be added in many if not most front-ends on Hive.
I really like that Hive communities were given another use case when they became one of the pillars upon which Sting Chat was built.
I don't know if it's just me and the corner of Hive I frequent these days but seemed like Hive communities took a backline to tribes/outposts because the latter also had their own tokens and reward pools.
While Sting Chat doesn't add tokenomics to Hive communities, it does put the spotlight on them again.
What Can You Do With Sting Chat?
For the first alpha version of Sting Chat, it is surprisingly... complete.
Among the major features it has:
Communities-Based Chat
If you have used discord, this is like the servers you join there. Except communities are specific to Hive and they exist on the blockchain.
I have seen that community admins and owners can add text channels, public or private (encrypted).
Direct Messages
There are 2 types of direct messaging.
Direct Message
Between 2-4 people. That's the regular direct message. Its characteristics are that users from this DM can't be removed and new users can't be added later, plus every user has its own encryption.
Group Messaging
When the situation requires that more than 4 people communicate privately, a group can be created which will have a certain password and key. Anyone with this password can communicate in the group. Invites can be sent using DM and then the group key will be sent.
These details and more can be found in the presentation post by Peak Open:
@peak.open/inviting-everyone-to-test-encrypted-chat-on-hive
On-chain or Off-chain?
When something new comes out on Hive, there will be one of the first questions to ask: is it on-chain?
To be honest, I don't see a reason why chit-chat would need to be stored immutably on-chain. And it isn't with Sting Chat.
This means they are stored either in the open (public channels) or encrypted on a centralized server.
The only thing I would make sure of in this area is to have redundancy for servers where Sting Chat databases are kept. It wouldn't be good if there would be database failures and discussions disappeared.
I don't know if it would make sense in the architecture chosen for Sting Chat, but if it does, I'd also add the option to make the DMs (not groups) p2p, saved locally by the DM participants (does it make sense for a web-based interface or only for a standalone application?). After all parties delete their DM flow, the conversation ceases to exist anywhere.
Inertia
With every change, there is a lot of inertia and even resistance before it makes its mark. We can see that with the adoption of Hive, even though, in this form or the previous one, it has been around for almost 7 years (believe it or not).
I believe Sting Chat adds another layer that increases the independence and resilience of Hive. Being open source and likely to be adopted in various parts of the ecosystem, it is something we need to consider using instead of Discord, which has become a norm in the space, but it should be treated as a potential attack vector if Hive would be under heavy concentrated fire in the future.