ngircd VS The Lounge

This won't likely help after the fact but I would suggest separating Artwork discussion into their own Discord server and then move all business partners and certainly financial information discussion with employees into private self-hosted servers so that one has control over the server, chat filters, IP/domain blocks and even approved/denied web links. It's not perfect and some may not be happy about having to register on a second site friction and all but it sounds like in this case it would have helped. Leave cloaking disabled on the business server so you can see where people are connecting from ahead of time and password protect sensitive channels.

Additionally IRC server filters can be updated daily with the most prevalent scam domains using the same sources as uBlock and a few other git mirrors on github. One could even block all text that appears to be any kind of URL and instead require them to get on voice chat to verify themselves. uMurmur is a tiny daemon that is very easy and quick to set up and one can also password protect channels on uMurmur. There is an android client for uMurmur called Mumla.

Take a look at Ngircd [1] and TheLounge as a quick way to set up a private secure chat server in less than 20 minutes. uMurmur [3] takes even less time to set up. All three daemons are available in sever Linux distribution repositories and have example configurations.

[1] - https://ngircd.barton.de/

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

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

I am pretty sure nobody except nerds knows what IRC is right now. It's long since been supplanted by user-friendlier group chat services.

I agree with this. Like I mentioned this is slowly changing with web front-ends to IRC like TheLounge. NGIRCD [1] + TheLounge [2] take all of about 10 minutes to set up and then maybe another 10 minutes to tie that into and configure IRC services such as Anope. I would not be surprised if this has already been automated with Docker or Ansible. Discord and Slack will probably be popular until they reach critical mass and feel confident enough to start doing hostile things to their user base or until someone with a large ego purchases them.

[1] - https://ngircd.barton.de/

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

Got bored and wanted to muck about with one of my favourite IRC bots (without peeing off my usual haunt' opers). So I compiled ngIRCd and had a bash at running RBot

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.