The Lounge VS filemanager

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.

File Browser

Thanks for sharing. I wasn't aware of dufs and it looks very solid. Fileserver[0] is another popular choice, though it's more GUI-oriented for file operations.

[0]: https://filebrowser.org/

The OnlyOfffice desktop app is a pretty good and free alternative to Microsoft Office Suite. You can simply install it on your local machine for offline access.

OnlyOfffice is also self-hostable as a web app for a cloud alternative to Google Sheets.

Filebrowser is a self-hostable alternative to Google Drive.

There's a pull request open to integrate OnlyOffice with Filebrowser for self-hosted google-drive + google docs.

https://github.com/filebrowser/filebrowser/pull/1420

For strictly local use, Google's Nearby share is technically FOSS but the documentation is basically non-existent and a proper Linux implementation is not here yet. Alternatives aren't hard to find though, with Mint's Warpinator or KDE Connect having worked well for me.

For non-local use (everything out of Bluetooth range), you almost have to trust a third party and it really depends on your use case. Want to send your friend a file or host pictures of your birthday for multiple people to download? For the former magic wormhole works great, for the later you could almost spin up a nextcloud or similar (personally I like https://github.com/filebrowser/filebrowser ). Want to regularly send files from device 1 to device 2? Now classic sync solutions like syncthing become really viable.

If everything else fails, FTP always has your back

I have been looking for a file browser which can run in game mode and is reasonably user friendly for simple file operations (copy/delete/rename, etc). Most people recommend Dolphin. it does work but there are issues: the color scheme looks really weird in game mode. context menu does not like game mode, either. Got file browser working (https://github.com/filebrowser/filebrowser) in game mode, which essentially an Edge app accessing a web server on localhost (running as user service). It took some time to set up but the end result is exactly what I would like to have.

File Browser - For access to the files on my NAS

filebrowser has user management plus sharing capabilities

Filebrowser suppports multiple shares with different expiration dates. It also offers file previews and generates QR Codes for the shares.

NextCloud is great for this, but if we're talking sharing files from your sync'd project collection, I'd probably instead recommend Filebrowser. You can point it to the same data store that syncthing is using and it'll make it easy to share the projects. Note that in order to do this you'll need to open up and expose filebrowser publicly. The simplest way to do this would probably be a cloudflare tunnel and for sharing files like this ad-hoc I don't see any issues with their TOS. For things like SyncThing though you'll still wanna do conventional port forwarding. the DIY approach instead of CloudFlare tunnel would be to port forward, set up a dynamic dns record, and set up letsencrypt certs