Hacker News Reader

There's lots of experts like that on Libera IRC. It's still a big hub for support of FOSS project.

So is Matrix which doesn't have the capability for this kind of checks (and is federated so you can add your own server without it).

View on HN

Maybe there is an astronomy channel, maybe there isn't. The official page [1] requires longer to install the client to even know which channels exist. That's arguably worse than Reddit, which requires no software nor registration to know which communities exist.

[1] https://libera.chat/guides/findingchannels

What do you mean? The webchat client is linked right there in the second paragraph, doesn't require you to install anything and let's you connect and list channels as a guest without registering. It took me like 30 seconds to find out that there is indeed an astronomy channel.

It was not clear to me that was a web browser interface, because it listed system requirements - none of which were an actual web browser.

Uhh, I'm not seeing any system requirements, am I blind? It just warns against using the /list command if you have a very slow internet connection since it produces rather voluminous output. If you scroll down a bit further they also link to a third-party website that has a searchable index of all publicly visible channels.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com