Replying to an earlier post

IRC exists and works great! :D

I’m on a self hosted network that is active almost around the clock, full of chill, wholesome and welcoming people. I can PM details for anyone who wants to come check us out (there is a webchat option, no need to set up a IRC client if you just want to have a look), don’t know if advertising is frowned upon here or not and I don’t want to spam or upset anyone.

Edit: Since my account is too young to be sending private messages to strangers, I’ll add the info here:

The server address is irc.inthemansion.com port: 6697 Join #lobby and say “hello” :)

Web chat can be found on the front page here https://inthemansion.com/ it will by default make you join #lobby. So if you are unfamiliar with IRC, that is the easiest way to try it out.

inthemansion.comMansionNET :: Welcome
Edited ⁨⁨Sep⁩ ⁨6⁩, ⁨2026⁩, ⁨11:09⁩⁩en

Replying to an earlier post

Well, turns out, I cant send messages because I’m a “very new account or very low reputation” :D I guess I’ll share here, mods can delete the comment if this sort of promotion is not allowed :)

The server address is irc.inthemansion.com port: 6697

Web chat can be found on the front page here https://inthemansion.com/

Join #lobby and say a greeting :)

Replying to an earlier post

Some bouncers need to have the chat history replay set to enabled, some clients need a plugin to replay the history. I use Soju+weechat and had to do a bit of configuring to get it to work, but now it does work fine. Also, some channels have a server side history replay enabled, for example, in our network the main channel replays automagically 15 last messages and you can do a command to replay the last 100 messages.

Mobile support has improved a lot lately. There is a couple of users on the network who only use mobile to chat. Personally I don’t use any, so I can’t say much about it.

Replying to @⁨TheMadCodger@piefed.social⁩

IRC is older than World Wide Web, and unfortunately there wasn’t as much innovation over years.

It was designated for a live chat so thought of also storing history and replay it didn’t make sense then (the reasoning was that if you needed to send something that’s not live, why not use email?)

Though people come up with own adhoc solutions like for example mentioned bouncer, some networks also had memo service where you could leave a message and there were also bots storing channel’s log.

If features like these are important to you, I didn’t think you will be happy with IRC, adding them would require rearchitecting the whole thing.

You can see for example slack doing it (it is heavily influenced by IRC although it evolved so much that maybe that is less visible now)

I didn’t have a chance to play with it yet, but I heard Matrix could be the successor to IRC.

Nothing against IRC, I spent years on it and loved it, but it isn’t great if important features for you are things like chat history when you were offline, embedding pictures in chat, threads, audio/video chat etc

The things where IRC still rules is: simplicity, very low resource requirements, and no accounts need, just pick a nick and you are in (this is also why keeping history for each user is so hard to add, when servers didn’t really handle accounts.)