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Comment by ty0ki | Hacker News Reader

Connect to IRCs, chat with folks on random channels Sadly my work blocks all irc servers.

Vouched for your comment, because human connection - even in chat form - seems to help me. I have also found that as a "computer person" who has to spend a lot of time in front f a screen, I felt far more connected in the 90s IRC world when I was actively engaging with other frontier folk in the field.

After a 10-year hiatus, I rediscovered that IRC/Discord is still where it's at - and for some communities Slack (with its own set of problems).

When I am unable to have facetime, another mind online can anchor me offline.

It wasn't just the 90s, sometime after like the late 2000s meeting people online organically became hard. I guess everyone who wanted to could just go on FB now. It's like everyone got put into their own little box. Discord would have been awesome if I was younger.

But yeah. Talking, chatting, reading, and running. Marathon video game binges with old friends because we have less and less in common now. Everything helps.

There's an increasing trend of IRC networks having Matrix bridges (inc. Freenode) and Matrix works almost entirely over HTTPS. Perfect for corporate networks and proxies! Helps me to stay sane at work.

https://matrix.org

> Matrix works almost entirely over HTTPS

What do you mean, "almost"? The client-to-server API runs entirely over HTTPS port 443. The server-to-server API is also HTTPS, but on a different port, but that's not a concern for the client.

Source: I'm running a small Synapse instance.

I'd imagine the 'almost' here is that VoIP defaults to using SRTP and STUN/TURN (WebRTC) rather than HTTP.

That makes sense. I didn't try VoIP yet at all.

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