alt Hacker NewsTimely! This weekend I spun up a little friends-only server on a VPS I had laying around. I used Ergo, enforced TLS, enforced authentication, and I hand-create accounts with temp passwords for my chums. For clients, I'm using Halloy on my Mac and Goguma on iOS. Their are other prettier clients, but Ergo and they all support a nice set of IRCv3. For example, they all have client history built in. Whenever I connect, the server replays all the messages I missed while offline (with a 30 day retention), no bouncer required.
Honestly, I'm trying to remember why we collectively moved away from this. I was terminally online in the 90s and the hadn't touched IRC in many years, but this is... actually quite nice.
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Tried Halloy on macOS for ~6mos, has some serious issues ...
(1) It silently disconnects from the server without indication, and does not reconnect. You might assume it is connected, until you send a message and see "message can not be sent". You will lose conversation history unless using a bouncer. Clicking around, all the buffers will clear indicating some major state issue, and you will have to restart it.
(2) Consistently uses ~5% CPU doing nothing at all.
(3) Doesn't behave like a macOS app, pressing the red "close window" button will close the window, but the main process goes ANR.
After leaving Textual since that was discontinued, guess I'm looking for a macOS IRC client again. Might give Mango a try.
Back in the day you needed a bnc if you wanted chat history. The mobile experience has been abysmal until very recently.
Also when discord came out there was a certain appeal to having voip built into the same app, and not having to maintain a separate vent/mumble/ts.