There's also http://irccloud.com, it's paid and includes a bouncer and mobile apps but I've switched to that from my self-hosted ZNC + Textual (https://www.codeux.com/textual/) setup and it's very worth the money. Just having push notifications on mobile and full backlog everywhere makes this a way better experience.
It got me back on using IRC every day after not using it regularly for years any more. Just following along in channels like #postgresql / #beets / #dokku on Libera I already learned a few new things.
I don't think it's quite accurate to call it a bouncer; there's no way to connect to IRCCloud's bouncer with your own client. They do provide a bouncer-like managed service though, and a pretty nice one at that. Long time user as well.
I've spent over 20 years on IRC and im still on every day. Two years ago, I felt the community could use more client options, so I created Halloy. It has since become my primary spare-time project, and I love seeing people enjoy IRC.
On IRC since 1997 - even still in the first channel I joined!
Writing an IRC client is really a fun and rewarding exercise.
I also more or less started my career as a software engineer by maintaining a mildly popular Linux one, at the time.
Some things I learned ...
- A lot about shipping to real users and their pain points, since the devs are naturally accessible by IRC and you get to meet directly
- A whole lot about what makes a successful technology
- Equally much about tech warts, as IRC suffers from a fair number misguided early decisions and many years without functioning governance
- How incredibly rewarding it is to work on products that users directly "live their lives" in and that can help facilitate anything they do - it taught me to look out for jobs that have similar substrate-like qualities
Good luck with your project, I'm glad to see the cycle of renewal continue.
mIRC is one of the best chat programs on the market these days. It uses megabytes of ram at most for hundreds of channels. It's a modern technology miracle and I wish more people used it.
I use Quassel because it's a so-called "split" client, where "quassel core" runs on a VPS, and then I can run actual clients of the quassel core on several different devices, including Quasseldroid on Android. It's a much better experience than sshing into a screen session.
To sell The Lounge some more, it essentially acts as both a bouncer and a web-based IRC client that you can access on any device. If you want to get a friend into IRC, you can provision them an account on your instance too. I've been running an instance for years without issues.
The soju bouncer world is quite nice. It is nicely integrated with 3 clients: gamja (web), goguma (Android) and senpai (golang terminal client). They are basic in some ways, but are configured for storing history and behaving like you'd expect a chat app to behave or of the box. I found it a very easy way to get started with IRC without having to keep my computer on all the time.
I find manually configuring clients for use with a bouncers not very intuitive. The quality of integration depends on which protocols each client supports. So, I'd recommend trying the clients I lists above first.
There are two hosted soju services I'm aware of, both about $20/yr (both are a part of a larger service, but the price is good even if you just use the bouncer). Both include gamja, so installing your own IRC client is not required.
some of us do not want to be found. obviously the easiest way to opt out of (most) of these things is to use a port other than 6667 and 6697, but when you've been operating on those ports for 10+ years, and you have an old friend who wants to pop in, how do you announce that you've moved to port 12000? adding a server password is another option, but we run into the same problems.
my IRC network in the past has had issues with script kiddies disrupting us and causing drama and claiming that our IRC server was insecure (it wasn't), and we figured out that they had found us through another IRC indexing site - one which we weren't aware were indexing us. another problem was someone adding a "partyline" bot to our server, which opened a channel to all other "partyline" channels that the bot had been added to. cute idea, but we did not ask for this, someone just plunked it in our server and left.
I wish there was a robots.txt for IRC, or at the very least for the indexers to tell one of the admins, "hey, we're indexing your server, please let us know if you don't want us to do that". we want to be left alone.
For XMPP, the problem is unfortunately not just discoverability – actually joining the discussion is becoming more and more of an ordeal.
Many once-popular servers have stopped accepting new registrations (e.g. jabber.ccc.de), were involved in some nation state espionage activities [1], or simply seem to no longer be around.
For modern clients, it's not looking much better. There's always a promising new one around for a while, only to not live up to the expectations and become the "still current best but unmaintained" option of the future.
As much as I like XMPP, I can't help but notice that its future looks somewhat grim.
> once-popular servers have stopped accepting new registrations
That's why providers.xmpp.net gives a good overview on where to sign up. The clients I know of also allow you to create an XMPP address directly from the app. The whole ordeal is to choose an username and a password then.
> involved in some nation state espionage activities
This is really more of a TLS thing than an XMPP thing, since the attacker was able to intercept traffic with a valid TLS certificate. Of course the second line of defense is E2EE here, but arguably, since the XMPP community was directly affected, they learned (monitoring certificate logs, channel binding , DANE, https://certwatch.xmpp.net/ ) a lot about defending even against this level of attacker from this incident.
> still current best but unmaintained [client]
I wonder which one you are talking about. My recommendations are Conversations, Gajim and Monal. They're all modern clients, actively maintained and have been around for a while now.
Unfortunately we need this for Discord a lot more. Really should be a default thing instead of extra steps and on by default with the possibility to export to something else (static html with some search engine) so it doesn't depend on the discord server running.
That's why I loathe any project that picks Discord (or worse, fucking Slack) when Zulip exists, is open source, offers hosting for open source projects, and ships with "publish these channels to the web": https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option#enabling-web-pub...
To see it in action, feel free to open this in an incognito window, it won't prompt you for credentials https://leanprover.zulipchat.com/
Zulip seems to rely too heavily on Javascript to be indexable by search engines. I copy-pasted some sentences from month-old posts on https://leanprover.zulipchat.com/ into Google and Bing, and neither could find the posts.
Discord community servers can already be searched and discovered. Which is effectively what this is about. I suspect you are more talking about the conversation on discord?
I don't think the actual chat conversations need to be indexed, in fact as a platform for chat I appreciate discord for what it is. though irc also worked fine for me back in the day.
What annoys me more is the fact that discord these days is also used as a substitute for forums and such. There is so much information just hidden on discord you will only find when you know to join specific servers because there is no way to search for that information from the outside.
For some topics and subjects that is fine. But for support for software (even open source) I feel that it is a loss and actually has contributed to a decline of information availability on the internet.
> What annoys me more is the fact that discord these days is also used as a substitute for forums and such. There is so much information just hidden on discord you will only find when you know to join specific servers because there is no way to search for that information from the outside.
Which would, of course, be solved by having those conversations indexed and searchable on the web.
> Discord community servers can already be searched and discovered.
By those that have an account and that know on which "servers" to find the content they're looking for.
> What annoys me more is the fact that discord these days is also used as a substitute for forums and such. There is so much information just hidden on discord you will only find when you know to join specific servers because there is no way to search for that information from the outside.
And that's exactly the problem. Discord is a great Teamspeak successor (I suppose; I've never used that). It's a horrible substitute for a bug tracker, development roadmap, forum, release announcement feed etc.
Excellent, I was looking for new channels to join and idle on.
In all seriousness, I hope this helps index some more active servers and some communities to grow. IRC was a big part of my life back at the turn of the century, but I spent some time last year sniffing around for my old haunts. They were either graveyards or did not exist anymore, sadly.
I think it is about as varied as communications outside of IRC: there are different communities with different rules, which are sometimes written down and linked from the channel topic. Generally hanging around quietly for a bit may help to get a sense of any particular community's customs.
> Perhaps a better question, how should you participate (as noob) without getting Stack Overflow beatings, and show respect of other people's time?
As long as you adjust when people give you guidance (if needed), you'd be fine.
Everyone does something bad/ill accidentally every now and then, it's not the end of the world, apologize, learn and move on. It becomes a huge hassle for everyone involved when it's repeated even after being told it's wrong, so just listen and follow what others (ops) tell you.
I just got sucked down the rabbit hole looking at all the super low pop servers here: https://www.ircdriven.com/networks/list/ definitely some interesting looking stuff, very esoteric websites. Cool.
I ran a site like that in the late 90s/early 00s (iirc) where we'd make available a server file containing user-submitted servers. We also ran news and interviews of notable IRC people. Fun times.
Readit News
* The lounge (web based) :
* Halloy (rust, native) : https://github.com/squidowl/halloy
* Tiny (rust, TUI; easier to configure than weechat) : https://github.com/osa1/tiny
* Weechat (TUI; the goat but harder, here's a good guide to setting it up) : https://newblood.anonops.com/weechat.html
It got me back on using IRC every day after not using it regularly for years any more. Just following along in channels like #postgresql / #beets / #dokku on Libera I already learned a few new things.
Writing an IRC client is really a fun and rewarding exercise.
I also more or less started my career as a software engineer by maintaining a mildly popular Linux one, at the time.
Some things I learned ...
- A lot about shipping to real users and their pain points, since the devs are naturally accessible by IRC and you get to meet directly
- A whole lot about what makes a successful technology
- Equally much about tech warts, as IRC suffers from a fair number misguided early decisions and many years without functioning governance
- How incredibly rewarding it is to work on products that users directly "live their lives" in and that can help facilitate anything they do - it taught me to look out for jobs that have similar substrate-like qualities
Good luck with your project, I'm glad to see the cycle of renewal continue.
- Emacs clients: built-in rcirc and erc, non-built-in Circe.
- irrsi (standalone TUI)
- Quassel IRC (GUI; have not tried it myself, but saw others using it).
- mIRC (GUI, for Windows).
edit: also just noticed parent post didn't include a link to it. https://thelounge.chat/
Soju works with other clients as well, but then requires some configuration. See https://git.sr.ht/~emersion/soju/tree/master/item/contrib/cl... for some possibilities.
I find manually configuring clients for use with a bouncers not very intuitive. The quality of integration depends on which protocols each client supports. So, I'd recommend trying the clients I lists above first.
There are two hosted soju services I'm aware of, both about $20/yr (both are a part of a larger service, but the price is good even if you just use the bouncer). Both include gamja, so installing your own IRC client is not required.
https://man.sr.ht/chat.sr.ht
https://pico.sh/bouncer (also accessible as an ssh app)
You can also self-host soju/gamja, but that takes a bit of work.
https://git.causal.agency/catgirl/about/
A retarded C compiler, a TLS lib if you want TLS, and you are good to go.
my IRC network in the past has had issues with script kiddies disrupting us and causing drama and claiming that our IRC server was insecure (it wasn't), and we figured out that they had found us through another IRC indexing site - one which we weren't aware were indexing us. another problem was someone adding a "partyline" bot to our server, which opened a channel to all other "partyline" channels that the bot had been added to. cute idea, but we did not ask for this, someone just plunked it in our server and left.
I wish there was a robots.txt for IRC, or at the very least for the indexers to tell one of the admins, "hey, we're indexing your server, please let us know if you don't want us to do that". we want to be left alone.
https://providers.xmpp.net/ to help find a provider
https://xmpp.org/software/ to help find clients/servers
Many once-popular servers have stopped accepting new registrations (e.g. jabber.ccc.de), were involved in some nation state espionage activities [1], or simply seem to no longer be around.
For modern clients, it's not looking much better. There's always a promising new one around for a while, only to not live up to the expectations and become the "still current best but unmaintained" option of the future.
As much as I like XMPP, I can't help but notice that its future looks somewhat grim.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37955264
That's why providers.xmpp.net gives a good overview on where to sign up. The clients I know of also allow you to create an XMPP address directly from the app. The whole ordeal is to choose an username and a password then.
> involved in some nation state espionage activities
This is really more of a TLS thing than an XMPP thing, since the attacker was able to intercept traffic with a valid TLS certificate. Of course the second line of defense is E2EE here, but arguably, since the XMPP community was directly affected, they learned (monitoring certificate logs, channel binding , DANE, https://certwatch.xmpp.net/ ) a lot about defending even against this level of attacker from this incident.
> still current best but unmaintained [client]
I wonder which one you are talking about. My recommendations are Conversations, Gajim and Monal. They're all modern clients, actively maintained and have been around for a while now.
- https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/
- https://www.ipingthereforeiam.com/
Plenty of boards run Multi-Relay Chat (MRC), which is IRC-ish.
To see it in action, feel free to open this in an incognito window, it won't prompt you for credentials https://leanprover.zulipchat.com/
I don't think the actual chat conversations need to be indexed, in fact as a platform for chat I appreciate discord for what it is. though irc also worked fine for me back in the day.
What annoys me more is the fact that discord these days is also used as a substitute for forums and such. There is so much information just hidden on discord you will only find when you know to join specific servers because there is no way to search for that information from the outside.
For some topics and subjects that is fine. But for support for software (even open source) I feel that it is a loss and actually has contributed to a decline of information availability on the internet.
Which would, of course, be solved by having those conversations indexed and searchable on the web.
By those that have an account and that know on which "servers" to find the content they're looking for.
> What annoys me more is the fact that discord these days is also used as a substitute for forums and such. There is so much information just hidden on discord you will only find when you know to join specific servers because there is no way to search for that information from the outside.
And that's exactly the problem. Discord is a great Teamspeak successor (I suppose; I've never used that). It's a horrible substitute for a bug tracker, development roadmap, forum, release announcement feed etc.
In all seriousness, I hope this helps index some more active servers and some communities to grow. IRC was a big part of my life back at the turn of the century, but I spent some time last year sniffing around for my old haunts. They were either graveyards or did not exist anymore, sadly.
If I wanted to get involved in say more technical/niche channels outside my expertise, is there any advice or unwritten rules I should know?
Perhaps a better question, how should you participate (as noob) without getting Stack Overflow beatings, and show respect of other people's time?
As long as you adjust when people give you guidance (if needed), you'd be fine.
Everyone does something bad/ill accidentally every now and then, it's not the end of the world, apologize, learn and move on. It becomes a huge hassle for everyone involved when it's repeated even after being told it's wrong, so just listen and follow what others (ops) tell you.