About

Chakany Systems builds software for private communication and researches human behavior and health. We continue to develop Hoot and Talon, our communication tools built on the Nostr Protocol.

Chakany Research brings together Suncatcher and our health research work.

Suncatcher studies interactions on social media by archiving Bluesky posts and making them queryable with SQL through an interactive Lisp REPL. It supports large-scale classification with models like Jev, algorithms over entire threads, and further analysis built on the dataset.

Visit Chakany Research ↗

The Nostr Protocol is a simple and open protocol that enables global, decentralized, and censorship-resistant communication.

While competing protocols are complex and oriented to a single application, Nostr shines by being simple and very flexible allowing many different kinds of uses. Nostr is typically known for being a decentralized Twitter alternative, however it has the potential for being so much more.

We believe that the flexibility that Nostr provides will allow users to leave centralized platforms like Gmail, WhatsApp, and most centralized platforms that exploit user data.

Companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple abuse their power to make obscene amounts of money from user data.

• If you wanted to install an app that wasn't in the Apple App Store, you couldn't. The only option was to jump though many hoops. Now, they only allow you if you're in the EU.
• Computers running Microsoft Windows coming preinstalled with Spyware for better ad targeting
• WhatsApp sending the metadata of your conversations back to Meta to build a connected graph of all of the people you talk to, and who you talk to talks to.
• Gmail scanning the emails you recieve for better ad targeting
• Discord scanning messages that their users sent on the platform to determine their gender

There are many other examples of these companies using their customer data for profit. Before you say with a smug face "Should've read the TOS!", do you read the TOS? Do your parents, coworkers, and friends read the 200 page TOS before signing up to Google? Chances are, no.

These companies can roofie their users with conditions in their massive terms of services that they may not agree to had they read it.

Nostr is in a unique position because its data is portable between servers (called relays). This allows communications programs to eliminate the middleman entirely, and connect directly to a box inside another user's home to upload messages to it, or directly to the user's device while it's online.

This completely eliminates the need for a middleman like Discord, Gmail, or WhatsApp as messages can be transferred in a manner that is secure and private. This is the power of Nostr that we are looking to harness, and this is only the tip of the iceberg.