client VS bitlbee

There also is Spacebar (aka fosscord) https://github.com/spacebarchat/client As well as Discord API "emulators" (litecord)

Fosscord is a self hostable chat platform that's compatible with discord, and the client is in development but is not really usable at the moment.

just git clone the repo from https://github.com/fosscord/fosscord-client and follow the instructions in building section. For that you need to do pkg install yarn first, though.

Seems like there is a client for it too https://app.fosscord.com/ or same but on github https://github.com/fosscord/fosscord-client.

Not yet to my knowledge, but keep an eye out for fosscord. It's an alternative client that also supports self-hosting Discord-compatible instances.

ah didn't realize it had gone away. its successor appears to be [0]

now I'm reliving the chaos of the late-00s/early-10s instant messaging apocalypse when AOL sunsetted AIM. Clients like Trillian were absolutely necessary before AIM shut down. Everybuddy was a good linux-friendly client. When I still spent time on IRC, I really really liked Bitlbee [1] with ERC [2].

(I'm not saying that there's a connection there, but rather that all the chat protocols started getting used less around the same time for the same reason, which was smartphones becoming commonplace in late-00s.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayttm

[1] https://www.bitlbee.org/

[2] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/erc.html

I use purple-discord (libpurple/Pidgin plugin) + BItlBee (IRC chat gateway, libpurple variant) + Quassel (distribued IRC client, like a bouncer) on a home server, and use Quasseldroid to connect on mobile. I would eventually like to simplify this setup.

I used to have a similar setup to use IRC for everything using https://www.bitlbee.org. Fun times!

Another approach to this is to use bitlbee's twitter support and your favorite Emacs IRC client to access that. This is especially nice if you are using bitlbee anyway.