IRC Today hosted IRC bouncer | Hacker News Reader

IRC Today hosted IRC bouncer

irctoday.com

29 pointstodsacerdoti21 comments

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I miss the funny bouncer and eggdrop hostnames from the early IRC days.

for self-hosted, look at https://thelounge.chat/

That is for web-IRC. Its getting to the same result slightly different than via native apps. Has advantages tho.

There’s also https://soju.im/ (which IRC Today is a hosted version of)

Edit: and the web chat part is https://codeberg.org/emersion/gamja from the same author

I successfully hosted Convos (yet-another-IRC-client) on fly.io for a few bucks per month. (It used to be free, but then it was not.)

https://community.fly.io/t/convos-irc-frontend-on-fly-io/188...

Then I realized I don't really use IRC at all so I turned it off. But, it works. (The lounge might too. I have no idea why I went with Convos, anymore.)

Really enjoyed IRC in the 90s... it was an underground culture that was unknown to most people... and a place where I got most of my MP3s!

Quassel IRC is another solution for this - it also works extremely well with the only downside being that it isn't tunneled over HTTP/S by default. Oh and it is self-hosted.

I can recommend it for a Windows/Linux/Android hybrid environment from personal experience

it supports core<--ssl-->client setup

it works well indeed, i run an instance of quassel-core on a VPS for many years and connect to it through wireguard tunnel exclusively (fits nicer in my overall scheme of accessing my services)

While Quassel's protocol uses encryption, we've actually long considered adding support for running the Quassel protocol over websockets. With the upcoming move to Qt6 that should finally be possible without much trouble. That might solve your issues.

Personally I think it's silly that the definition of "internet" has shifted so much over the past few years that "it's not HTTP" is now seen as a downside. The internet has finally become the BTX/Telex-style server/client network it was designed to replace.

In fact, I'm fighting right now with my ISP (O2). They don't want to sell me a business connection. At the same time, they intentionally degrade service to prevent me from hosting services on my private connection. That includes forcefully closing PPPoE connections every 24h, assigning a random new IPv6 range every 24h (but with a valid_lft of 1.438 billion seconds), etc. But they do offer 10 consecutive phone numbers with 3x concurrent calling for private contracts.

well I am completely with you there - but you have to remember what the words "Corporate Firewall" might mean and that the only thing apparently protecting us from a Russian takeover is closing off all outgoing ports except 80 and 443 :)

I don't have an IP where i can just run Quassel on 443. Using it over websockets on a subdomain might indeed solve my troubles.

What does IRC Today do that IRCCloud (https://www.irccloud.com) can't?

how many people still use irc? sad, but i would have thought discord would have pretty much killed it off.

personally I think discord is shit - I wish it would go away. IRC is a lot more resilient towards takeovers and enshittification. look at what happened to slack.

What happened to Slack, if you don't mind me asking?

It started locking off basic features behind paywalls and is nagging you about it. Before the rise of discord and in the professional space teams it also started to close off external API gateways to for instance IRC.

Its the basic enshitification playbook really. They got steamrolled during COVID by zoom and later teams somewhat interrupting the process.

We are somewhere over 260,000 [1] and I am not going anywhere at least.

[1]: https://netsplit.de

Just in terms of IRC as a protocol there are actually millions of daily users, many live chat features on the Web (like on video streaming websites such as Twitch) use IRC as a basis: https://dev.twitch.tv/docs/chat/irc/

Now for that example it isn't a full IRC implementation, but you can use a common IRC client to connect and chat on such services.

How many of these are bots/bouncers, running on some forgotten vhost?

As many as one would like to substantiate a claim of IRC being "alive" or "dead"? I am fairly certain that the majority of the users I see are alive and real, but how am I even supposed to prove that?

Proving 'aliveness' would be indeed difficult, the more time passes, the harder.

It depends on the network, taking one of the oldest, still existing, EFNET for example, has many bots for technical reasons, so some channel can't be taken over in case of netsplits. The ratio seems like up to a handful of users vs. a dozen bots for the smaller channels. That alone should distort the numbers massively.

For other networks, let's say LiberaChat, it may look different from a technical point of view, but there arises the question of 'philosophical zombiness', as I've witnessed the same shitheadedness repeating the same nonsense over periods of years, when I made the mistake to go there again. That could be bots, now even more so, or just philosophical zombies. Or some so called neurodiversity in action, which I couldn't care less about.

Does it matter? Probably not. It could be seen as a failure of my Zen, messing up my own solipsistic creation ;)

i am annoyed whenever i learn that a popular open source project's (only) real time communication/support channel is on one of the closed platforms; i then chose to not use it.

i've not encountered projects (relevant to me at least) which moved from IRC to closed platforms, some moved to matrix though (which is only mildly annoying to me).

Also with the network adoption [0] of ircv3 features like history playback, the need for bouncers on always-on 24/7 machines should decrease

[0]: https://ircv3.net/support/networks

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