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.)