susam.net VS The Lounge

I have a similar setup for my personal and project websites. Some similarities and differences:

* I use Linode VMs ($5/month).

* I too use Debian GNU/Linux.

* The initial configuration of the VM is coded as a shell script: https://github.com/susam/dotfiles/blob/main/linode.sh

* Project-specific or service-specific configuration is coded as individual Makefiles. This takes care of creatng An example: https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/main/Makefile

* The software is written in Common Lisp. In case of a personal website or blog, a static website is generated by a Common Lisp program. In case of an online service or web application, the service is written as a Common Lisp program that uses Hunchentoot to process HTTP requests and return HTTP responses.

* I use Nginx too. Nginx serves the static files as well as functions as a reverse proxy when there are backend services involved. Indeed TLS termination is an important benefit it offers. Other benefits include rate limiting requests, configuring an allowlist for HTTP headers to protect the backend service, etc.

I began developing personal websites in 2001. It was a time when people like me would develop personal websites just because we could. It didn't matter whether we had something useful to say or if anyone visited the website. All that mattered was that it was fun! I still maintain my website in the same spirit.

I do share the technical posts from my websites on HN and Reddit hoping to get some feedback but that's not the primary motive. Also, there were no HN and Reddit in 2001. Back then I used to write for myself and I still do so now. My personal website is a way for me to keep an archive of some fun things I know so that my future self can look back at them when needed or desired. Only a few days ago, I added a jokes page[1] to my website just because I thought it would be nice to keep my favourite jokes somewhere easily accessible.

As years go by, I've found that the friction of editing and publishing new posts or pages to my website has only become less. First came, virtual private servers that swayed me away from shared web hosting solutions. Then came Git which made it incredibly efficient and convenient to keep a change history of my website and sync it to any system. I write my pages in plan HTML using Emacs. Then git add; git commit; make pub [2] and the updated website is published within seconds. A Common Lisp program reads all my HTML pages, adds a common theme and template to them and writes them out to a directory Nginx can read from. It is as low friction as it can get that suits my taste and preferences while maintaining complete flexibility on the website.

It has been 13 years since I wrote my first "Hello!" and while HTML and web development and publishing has evolved a lot since then, I am still having fun!

[1] https://susam.net/maze/jokes.html

[2] https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/main/Makefile#L144

form.service (the systemd unit file)

Source code [0] is available on GitHub; looks like they wrote their own simple site generator.

I've been thinking about something similar (maybe even simpler) for my blog too.

[0]: https://github.com/susam/susam.net

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.