Top 10 C Chat Projects

Weechat

22 2,824 9.8 C

The extensible chat client.

Project mention: Neonmodem: TUI for Lobsters, HN, etc. | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-01-11

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
quiet

10 1,813 9.8 C

A private, p2p alternative to Slack and Discord built on Tor & IPFS

Project mention: Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-01-16

> because, right here right now, that is such a hypothetical situation that I have absolutely no idea why it needs a real-world demonstration of proof of concept using currently-available technology.
So I just want to point out that IPFS was fairly deliberately designed to have numerous, forward-compatible features that could be swapped out in the future : like https://multiformats.io/ and in particular https://multiformats.io/multiaddr/ .
In the IPFS community, there's always been a fairly heated discussion about which bit of the entire system should be stuck with the term IPFS. Like, if you took away the libp2p protocol, and just served CIDs over http, would it be IPFS? What if you took away CAR files (the merkle-tree file format used to define multi-item content)? What if you're a private IPFS network, with no shared nodes with the public network (like https://github.com/TryQuiet/quiet ). What if you didn't use bitswap, the file transfer protocol (Filecoin doesn't use bitswap, and mostly doesn't interconnect with the main public IPFS network). What about if you didn't use a DHT to find providers of a CID. What if you're not using any of the "IPFS" software stack, but your implementation still uses bits and pieces of content-addressability as defined in the standard?
Interestingly, right now, there are a bunch of experiments going in all of these directions: I think it's fair to say that if you wanted to test out content-addressable networks across the solar system, they probably wouldn't be IPFS as it is now, but their nature could probably be described using the primitives the IPFS stack uses, and learning about what needs to change would give a useful direction to some part of the extended IPFS ecosystem.
InfluxDB

www.influxdata.com
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profanity

20 1,257 8.9 C

Ncurses based XMPP client

Project mention: Profanity IM – Ncurses based XMPP client | news.ycombinator.com | 2023-08-12
purple-facebook

13 954 0.0 C

Facebook protocol plugin for libpurple (moved from jgeboski/purple-facebook)
bitlbee

4 585 3.9 C

An IRC to other chat networks gateway :bee:

Project mention: How Beeper Mini Works | news.ycombinator.com | 2023-12-05

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
ngircd

5 420 8.6 C

Free, portable and lightweight Internet Relay Chat server

Project mention: Installing anope services :) | /r/irc | 2023-06-10
srain

2 291 7.0 C

Modern IRC client written in GTK

Project mention: Best IRCv3 experience on modern Mac OS? | /r/irc | 2023-09-27

Quassel - https://www.quassel-irc.org/ - looks like a contender and it supports MacOS, Srain (https://srain.silverrainz.me/) also has a more modern appearance and is built for GTK3 but I don't see official macOS builds available.
WorkOS

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tiny-webrtc-gw

11 69 7.2 C

tiny/fast webRTC video conferencing gateway

Project mention: Need help with audio calls for rooms with about 10 people in each. | /r/WebRTC | 2023-06-05
updog

1 8 7.0 C

Updog is a chat app in c (by moussacodes)

Project mention: Seeking Programming Buddies for Collaborative C-based Terminal Chat App Project | /r/ProgrammingBuddies | 2023-05-31
papayaChat

1 0 0.0 C

Command line chat service written in C

NOTE: The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars. The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or since we started tracking (Dec 2020). The latest post mention was on 2024-01-16.