Weechat VS The Lounge

WeeChat[0] with Bitlbee[1] supports a metric assload of services, albeit by pretending they're IRC (which does work - I spent years in weechat/irssi with bitlbee talking to various people on disparate services.)

Or if you're just after Telegram/WhatsApp, nchat[2] is ok (I can vouch for the Telegram half only.)

[0] https://weechat.org

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

[2] https://github.com/d99kris/nchat

And UnrealIRCD still rocks. For a quick-and-dirty setup I've deploy ng-ircd but Unreal has always been my go-to for anything serious. If nothing else it can be useful as a backup or internal platform during the rare events that Slack or Discord are having an incident. The common complaint is a lack of channel back-log but it can be front-ended with TheLounge [1] or Convos [2]. I personally prefer to handle that with gnu screen or tmux and WeeChat [3].

[1] - https://github.com/thelounge

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

[3] - https://weechat.org/

The link posted was to the dev blog, the actual website can be found at [0]. On the blog, the right side menu under "Links" also links to the website.

[0] - https://weechat.org/

I’m afraid you’re in the wrong subreddit. This subreddit is dedicated to WeeChat the IRC client., not the proprietary messaging app built by Tencent.

First off, grab yourself an IRC client. On their connection info page Hackint has information for both WeeChat and Hexchat, but you could use any IRC client.

That's nothing to do with weechat? https://weechat.org/

Gajim is for XMPP. For IRC you need Hexchat or Weechat or something like that.

I am not familiar with HexChat but you might consider using a different IRC client that allows you to silence anything/everything by default and only alert you on specific keywords you are interested in. If you like command line tools, consider trying out WeeChat IRC client [1] It is very customizable and there are many scripts for it.

[1] - https://weechat.org/

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.