You know, I wish I could enjoy IRC - or chatrooms in general. But I just struggle with them. Forums and their ilk, I get. I check in on them and see what’s been posted since I last visited, and reply to anything that motivates me to do so. Perhaps I’ll even throw a post up myself once in a while.
But with IRC, Matrix, Discord, etc, I just feel like I only ever enter in the middle of an existing conversation. It’s fine on very small rooms where it’s almost analagous to a forum because there’s little enough conversation going on that it remains mostly asynchronous. But larger chatrooms are just a wall of flowing conversation that I struggle to keep up with, or find an entry point.
Anyway - to answer the actual question, I use something called “The Lounge” which I host on my VPS. I like it because it remains online even when I am not, so I can atleast view some of the history of any conversation I do stumble across when I go on IRC. I typically just use the web client that comes with it.
I feel the same way. I don’t feel like hanging around for someone else’s conversation to end so I can actually get what the fuck is happening.
I use the web client of libera.chat and I love it because convenience!
Self hosted ‘The Lounge’ is great.
Yes TheLounge is fantastic but I switched to Convos these days because it’s lighter weight and I somehow manage to overrun my disk much less often :)
Twitch dot tv
Quassel, self-hosted.
hexchat, also Konversation
Polaris.
Yes i am old
Convos - self hosted web based client written in Perl of all things, because it’s small, simple, does exactly what I want and no more, and avoids my having to faff with client + bouncer which was getting old 10 years ago and feels positively withering now.
ERC, why leave Emacs?
Because it’s healthy.
Irssi all the way
Unfortunately it’s practically unusable for my use case, which is talking in CJK channels on non-UTF8 servers (when the channel name also has such characters), because recode support has been broken for 20 years.
Same. I used mIRC back in the 90’s, but ever since I started dabbling with servers I preferred to have an irssi client running inside a screen session somewhere. Allowed me to catch up on things that happened while I was AFK, as well as provide some continuity while I was on the move and/or in a dodgy connection.
ircCloud because my self hosted push notifications were failing and it worked right away.
Irssi before I started depending on push notifications though.
I use Hexchat. It’s a fine GUI a client, simple and reliable. I use a ZNC bouncer so no need to keep a CLI client running 24/7.
Just to let you know, Hexchat is no longer maintained, unless someone has forked it. Might be worth looking into alternatives.
Has IRC been getting many new features recently? It kind of feels like the sort of thing where software can become “finished”.
I mean yeah, Hexchat does work pretty well and is kind of finished. But it’s possible there are existing security vulnerabilities or new ones to be discovered in the future.
IRCv3 has extended IRC quite a bit over the past decade, fixing a lot of minor pain points if clients support the fixed versions of the protocol.
Aw drat. That sucks. Thanks for pointing that out
Same. Hexchat + znc = peak of software development
irssi. the plugin stuff is nice, terminal is better than GUI, and when themed it doesn’t look terrible
Slack
The one I wrote myself. Not because its any better ha ha. Its pretty fun to work on it though.
