Malten

Ephemeral message streaming

Overview

Malten is an ephemeral messaging service. It contains solely streams of text and nothing more. Streams have an idle lifetime of 1024 seconds. Each stream supports 1024 messages as a FIFO and 1024 characters per message. Streams can be discovered through exploration or via the API.

Rationale

Most messaging services today store the messages on a server. Even when they are deleted, it's likely those messages are still stored somewhere or the data was at one point in time backed up. Services like WhatsApp and Signal might be secure or encrypted but still continue to persist data on the client. Many of the services are also run by giant tech corporations. We need a simple and secure self hostable alternative.

Design

Malten keeps everything in memory, nothing is ever written to disk or a database. This is to ensure privacy and security. We do not want to persist data and ideally also want to encrypt messages on the client side. Streams are aged out based on TTL and each stream limits the number of messages and char length to ensure we can comfortably run malten in memory on most devices.

Roadmap

• Presence - User presence status
• Secure Pipes - Stream between two users
• Decentralisation - Interconnect multiple Malten servers
• Websocket support - Real time messaging directly to the browser
• Client side encryption - AES-256 on the user side so we never see the data
• Configurable stream TTL - Per stream configuration to increase or decrease for DMs or Notes

Usage

Use the Go toolchain to install

go get github.com/asim/malten

Or download the latest release binary

• https://github.com/asim/malten/releases/latest

Malten is a self executable, to run it simply do

./malten

Browse to localhost:9090 or host behind an nginx proxy

API

Below is a high level overview of the API

Streams

To create a new stream

POST /streams

Params used

stream: string e.g stream=foo
private: bool e.g private=true

To retrieve a list of streams

GET /streams

Messages

To retrieve messages for a stream

GET /messages

Params for messages

stream: string e.g stream=foo
limit: integer e.g limit=25
direction: integer e.g direction=1 or direction=-1
last: timestamp e.g last=1652035113591000000

An example retrieval

GET /messages?direction=1&limit=25&last=1652035113591000000&stream=foo

To create messages

POST /messages

Params for messages

stream: string e.g stream=foo
text: string e.g text=helloworld

An example

POST /messages?stream=foo&text=helloworld

Web

Live server https://malten.xyz

Testing

For development http://localhost:9090