unrealircd VS Movim

UnrealIRCD front-ended by TheLounge web interface that has history would fit what you described, but the setup is not super quick. No registration would be required, TheLounge provides chat persistence. Both are open source. Visitors would not need to be technical and would not need to know IRC commands. Rooms can be deleted by the channel operator. TheLounge is browser based and does not require any additional software.

[1] - https://www.unrealircd.org/ https://github.com/unrealircd/unrealircd/

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

Trivial. Set up your favorite IRC server, UnrealIRCd would be fine, then create a tor onion service, but instead of forwarding port 80 (HTTP), you'd forward 6667 (IRC). Done.

When https://siskin.im/ is seriously touted as the best iOS client for XMPP, you already lost 50% of the market share in the US. And if you don't have any usable app for 50% of your users in one of the most important markets, you can not really claim "interoperability", can you?

Don't get me wrong, it would be great if more people were using XMPP. Now that I am more involved in the Fediverse space I'm learning how many wheels are being reinvented and XMPP has already solved. If more people learned about https://movim.eu I'd be able to shut off Communick and move on to do something else to do with my life, but the reality is that XMPP failed to achieve critical mass because it never had someone to complete control the protocol.

Let me put it in another way: of all the existing projects out there, which one does actually bring material benefit to the users and publishers compared with, e.g, Mastodon, Matrix, Movim or Nostr?

Any Thinkpad will do the job. I'm working daily on a T430 and X220 for both my personal and professional web dev work. I've been developing Movim for more that 10years on the same computer https://movim.eu/

For social networking atop XMPP, see https://movim.eu/

Combined with the in-development ActivityPub gateway from Libervia, interop with Mastodon, Pleroma and others becomes possible too. The decentralized social web space is quite active at the moment.

If you don't care at all about poluar figures and just want to share content with people you actually know, https://movim.eu would be a much better alternative.

> No registration needed for group members

This one is the most troublesome I think.

Usually this is in a conferencing solutions though, so no such thing as chat rooms, I think.

Otherwise I would suppose something like XMPP with a web frontend, eg https://movim.eu/

ejabberd supports anonymous users, though I can't say if movim or any else web-client supports that natively

https://www.ejabberd.im/Anonymous-users-support/index.html