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Comment by ventana | Hacker News Reader

It just looks like a funny slop project if you read the English readme, but reading the Russian PHILOSOPHY.md [1] (auto-translated [2] if you don't read Russian) makes you realize that there's probably something more than "let's implement a messenger using git remote as a storage", knowing how popular messenger apps are getting blocked in Russia.

[1]: https://github.com/vanyapr/makaroshki/blob/main/PHILOSOPHY.m...

[2]: https://github-com.translate.goog/vanyapr/makaroshki/blob/ma... (Google Translate)

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>Macaroni Messenger is not a political statement. >We are not trying to circumvent restrictions. >We are not trying to circumvent restrictions. >We are not trying to fight the laws.

This is talking politics without talking politics. The project literally attempts to circumvent russian censorship restrictions and their spirit. This is either a joke the file talks about or naive CYA.

Cool project nevertheless, I like idea of an utility SPA distributed as bare HTML file that doesn't even require a web server.

There is a popular view in Russia, including within the software developers communities, that "politics" is something bad and dirty; people often ban "politics" in group chats and forums.

As a result, a highly technical person might work on a very complex solution to circumvent the restrictions but will declare (and probably even truly believe) that they are not making a political statement – as opposed to, for example, attending a protest, which is definitely considered a political action, or supporting a politician.

Thanks for clarifying, that's a pretty good summary. Russian developers experienced the same "HN is not for politics" kinds of reaction on Habr (russian HN, more or less) a decade ago, until politics came for them and Habr died. Before that, "being outside of politics" was a stance some people identified with because back then Putins regime didn't repress as much and the situation was "stable". Seeing a take like that still having its followers after our autocracy matured even more is disheartening and sad.

> Seeing a take like that still having its followers after our autocracy matured even more is disheartening and sad.

I suppose it’s more of a CYA nowadays than that. (Well, at least one can hope.)

Here's the translated version I got (GH translate didn't work for me for some reason).

https://pastebin.com/raw/EPtJM5Dp

Slightly better translation: https://markdownpastebin.com/?id=fb9680965f42433fb3a4c6bf7a0...

documentation was updated in the last few days. You might want to read the section about the funny legal collision this architecture creates — not sure, but it might apply to other jurisdictions too, not just Russia. Either way, it's an interesting side effect of using generic git hosting as a message transport.

The paradox is that Macaroni Messenger is absolutely a joke project.

But once you reduce everything to Git + JSON, adding things like PGP, age, signatures, encrypted attachments, or end-to-end encryption becomes surprisingly easy.

Which makes it even funnier.

At first glance it looks like a toy.

After a few minutes you start asking:

“Wait… why does this actually make sense?”

I think the protocol is a bit underestimated. People see the joke before they see the architecture.

There are some surprisingly interesting properties hiding behind the absurdity.

Maybe it’s a hidden gem.

Or maybe I’m just rationalizing a messenger implemented as a single HTML file.

It does kinda make sense... until it doesn’t. It is a cool project from a tech standpoint, but it’s not practical when we have, well, email? (This is discussed elsewhere in the comments already, of course.)

That’s exactly what I thought after posting — so now it supports end‑to‑end encryption without a handshake. Still a single HTML file. Still no backend.

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