convos VS The Lounge

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...

IRC as a protocol is indeed incredibly simple and easy to get started with. Years ago did discover this when I was able to make [this atrocity](https://github.com/creesch/discordIRCd) bridging IRC and discord where for IRC I effectively did a simple server implementation.

There is a caveat, though. Like many older protocols (ftp) there is a lot that was not initially written down or left up to clients and server implementations. This, does lead to a lot of edge cases you need to be aware of once you want to actually support a wider user group.

Also, as this is apparently is still a discussion. IRC is not simple from a modern user UX perception. Registration can be complex and confusing, though hidden a bit through clients. Managing channels with various flags is a whole other thing. Then there is also the fact that these days people are no longer used to the fact that they can't see messages from periods where they were not connected. Of course, the latter can be easily handled by a BNC or fancy clients like https://thelounge.chat . But, that is only easy for technically inclined folks.

> It’s 2024, people aren’t going to go out of their way to setup “bouncers” to keep up with conversation that happens when they’re not online or leave their computer running 24/7.

You can just set up something like The Lounge [0].

[0] https://thelounge.chat/

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).

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

As another self-hosted solution, I quite like TheLounge (https://thelounge.chat)

TheLounge (https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge) - web IRC client that I set to listen on my vpn/mesh. Works great on desktop and mobile, and supports push notifications.