History

I was playing around with AI and to talk to it wanted a secure and resilient channel. Found Tox, a fun creation of 4chan people! It uses torrent-like technology to organize a messenger kind of system with video calls and group chats. A neat little thing that can work in pretty much any conditions and if you give to it a DHT sever, it becomes unstoppable!

The project is has it all - e2e, p2p, file transfer, groups, avatars, calls, desktop sharing and drama! With a codebase written by absolute beast of engineers some time in 2013 and passed through branching after a monetary-related drama in the team.

The core library is a pure C goodness with a QT desktop client and a ncurses-based terminal client Toxic. The latter took me on a nostalgic journey back to my childhood, telnetting through freenet.am into BBS systems to access links text-based browser and to download some porn over the z-modem protocol into my hyper terminal on a an old 486 with 56.5 modem. https://github.com/JFreegman/toxic

v1.0 — Vibe matching (2025–2026)

The first version of Resonator was an experiment in LLM-based human matching. Users connected to a central TCP server, broadcast short text messages (“vibes”), and the server used a local LLM (llama.cpp) to classify whether pairs of users resonated with each other.

Key characteristics of v1.0:

  • Central TCP/WebSocket server (resonator_server.py)
  • Users identified by IP:port hash — no accounts
  • LLM-only matching — no embeddings or vector search
  • Batched GPU inference via LlamaBatch multi-sequence API
  • Newline-delimited JSON protocol

The matching experiment proved that meaningful connections could emerge from minimal signal. But the architecture was centralized, the protocol was ad-hoc JSON, and it solved only one narrow use case.

v2.0 — Protocol (2026–present)

Resonator was reconceived as a protocol — a set of rules for building decentralized networks, not a single application.

The key shift: everything became RDF. Communication, state, pipeline definitions, and computation all use RDF triples exchanged over end-to-end encrypted peer-to-peer links.

The architecture split into two layers:

  • Carrier — a C library wrapping the Tox protocol for encrypted P2P transport, speaking RDF 1.1 Turtle on the wire
  • Antenna — a Rust runtime with an embedded RDF triplestore and JavaScript engine, processing data streams through programmable DAGs

No central server. No feeds. No algorithms. Just peers exchanging semantic data directly.