convos VS slackcat

Excellent idea! You'll have a mature, open standard protocol under the hood, with no vendor lock-in, excellent extensibility, and great modern frontends like The Lounge (https://thelounge.chat/) or Convos (https://convos.chat/) to choose from (and you can choose).

And UnrealIRCD still rocks. For a quick-and-dirty setup I've deploy ng-ircd but Unreal has always been my go-to for anything serious. If nothing else it can be useful as a backup or internal platform during the rare events that Slack or Discord are having an incident. The common complaint is a lack of channel back-log but it can be front-ended with TheLounge [1] or Convos [2]. I personally prefer to handle that with gnu screen or tmux and WeeChat [3].

[1] - https://github.com/thelounge

[2] - https://github.com/convos-chat/convos/

[3] - https://weechat.org/

For the other layers one can front-end IRC with TheLounge [1][2] or Convos [3][4]. TheLounge only persists history in private mode meaning that users are created in that front-end and chat messages are in Redis. For small networks or groups of friends this is probably fine.

Notably missing is voice chat. I use the Mumble client [5] with the Murmur or uMurmur [6] server which is light-weight enough to run on ones home router. I use it on Alpine Linux, works great. It's not a shiny and attention grabbing as Discord but probably fine for everyone else. For people to create their own voice channels would require the full-blown Murmur server.

[1] - https://github.com/thelounge

[2] - https://thelounge.chat/

[3] - https://github.com/convos-chat/convos/

[4] - https://convos.chat/

[5] - https://www.mumble.info/

[6] - https://github.com/umurmur/umurmur/wiki/Configuration

FWIW TheLounge [1] and Convos [2] can front-end an IRC server giving it much of the look of a modern client and also chat persistence when using TheLounge in private mode. The trade-off in my opinion is scalability. With a bog standard IRCD I can handle tens of thousands of clients per node. Adding web persistent chat adds memory usage.

[1] - https://github.com/thelounge https://thelounge.chat/

[2] - https://github.com/convos-chat/convos/ https://convos.chat/

IRC is a mature, extensible, open protocol, with a wide variety of server and client implementations to suit many use cases, servers can be self-hosted and federated, and modern web-based clients like The Lounge or Convos offer a user experience equivalent to Discord, Slack, etc.

Standard IRC with a web interface like The Lounge or Convos

And there are some great web-based clients like the Lounge and Convos that offer an equivalent UX to Discord or Slack, are open-source, self-hostable, and based on a mature, reliable, and extensible open protocol.

Take a look at convos to see if it fits your needs: https://convos.chat/

There are web front-ends to IRC that can mitigate message loss without having to run bouncers. Convos [1] and TheLounge [2] come to mind but there are others [3]

[1] - https://convos.chat/

[2] - https://thelounge.chat/

[3] - https://www.ilmarilauhakangas.fi/irc_technology_news_from_th...

I don't see why you couldn't do the same in a Slack command-line program as well? There even seem to be examples of doing that.

https://github.com/csabapalfi/slackcat