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Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

How does IRC work on mobile these days?

Last time I used IRC seriously, I had to get off the train because I was chatting more on mobile than not and the mobile clients were basically un-serviceable (IIRC, protocol is too chatty and stateful for reliable connection on a device continuously changing its physical network connection).

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As it always was, the best way to use IRC is sadly to sign up for a third party shell account and run a bnc or an irssi+tmux session or similar.

It's little wonder to me that IRC's lunch got eaten; the UX on mobile is just awful.

I always used a client called quassel that had an always on server you hosted somewhere. Then you had mobile and desktop apps that you used to connect to it. Because the server portion was always connected you did not miss stuff even when your client was disconnected.

Quassel so far has been working really well on Android connected to my Quassel Core docker container on a vps.

Mosh+screen+irssi is way more usable in terrible network conditions than any of the more contemporary options

This has value. But I never go anywhere with terrible network conditions, so it has no value to me.

I find The Lounge to be fine for me on desktop and mobile. Also you can leave it connected, potentially eliminating the need for a bouncer.

https://thelounge.chat/

irccloud is a third party thing that makes this as seamless as other persistent chats but its not free

Ish. Their mobile experience is notably jankier than discord, but still best in class for IRC.

Irccloud is a popular and easy to use client with a good mobile interface.

I use weechat, with the glowing-bear frontend on both desktop and mobile.

In both cases, the mobile interface is a frontend for something else instead of being an actual irc client.

I run a web based bouncer on my cluster and VPN into its interface on mobile devices.

No idea, but Libera's Matrix bridge seems to work really well.

Like in past days. If you have a working OS (ie not iOS) you can use it fine. Otherwise use Lounge or something similar.

I was using Android and the experience was not good. Disconnects every time I put my phone in my pocket.

You need to disable power savings.

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