I found myself loving what this guy writes about IRC, and I think a lot of his words will go straight to the heart of specially the older nerds here on Lemmy.
Hope you enjoy.
I used to love IRC and have a fair amount of nostalgia for it. That said, a post advocating for IRC that doesn’t even mention Matrix is failing to discuss the best replacement for IRC. Matrix is the IRC killer. After using Matrix, I don’t understand how anyone could want to go back to IRC with its net splits, non persistent chat history, lack of rich text, etc.
I see the Matrix rooms being bridged with their IRC counterparts. So IRC servers can live a few more years, I think.
I’m on the matrix.org server, it works well. Install something like Element as a client if you like and join some rooms.
Some sample rooms:
Irc clients don’t need to be in a web browser, and personally I don’t want persistent chat saved forever. I also just want text much of the time.
That said, I do find some of the features in discord (and hence in matrix) nice. I just currently have only a support for lemmy in Matrix and haven’t seen groups use those servers yet. Discord hasn’t yet caused a migration.
There are a lot of Matrix clients to choose from; they’re not all electron web apps and there’s even a terminal app available. There could easily be a Matrix client that behaves the way you want, but I couldn’t tell you if one exists. You’d have to try a few and see if they have settings that work well for you.
I guess I’m a little curious about why you wouldn’t want persistent chat history. Major IRC networks log all chats anyway, so it’s only you who’s missing out on having that chat history available if you are ever offline.
Still use IRC but it gets really clunky / complicated when you want to have push notifications / persistent history etc… You end up setting up something like ZNC (IRC Bouncer) to act as an always online server and then hooking clients to it persist your online status.
It works out of the box and completely painlessly with The Lounge.
It web based so some might not be a fan, but for mobile use it’s pretty great. Just install as PWA on Android or iOS and it’s pretty seamless.
It looks nice. But I assume it’s sending messages in clear text? Im using Element a bit (https://element.io/) but it doesn’t feel as fun as Lemmy. I guess it can be great for general chatting in real time though.
Bonus points for optimising IRC nostalgia post for rendering in Lynx.
I just asked about getting in to it in the current year if you have any tips: https://lemmy.world/post/2348478?scrollToComments=true
