I’ve recently been getting back into IRC and found a pretty neat project in the process.

I first checked out IRC not long ago and one reason it stood out was its simplicity. Well, at the protocol level at least. Some of the clients I tried were slightly confusing and took some time to configure and get used to. But I liked the idea that when you weren’t online, you were well and truly disconnected. Push notifications have their place, but they sort of make it too easy to be always available which I don’t think is that healthy.

The main problem with IRC I felt at the time was that when you reconnect, most of the time you have no context for what’s been going on in the channel while you were away. I learned about bouncers, which are a sort of middleman you can set up between you and the server which keeps your session alive while you’re disconnected, but wasn’t really interested in getting one set up.

A couple days ago I reopened Konversation, the IRC client I’d been using, for the first time in a while to check in on a couple channels and thought maybe I’d better take another look at other ways to IRC. I came across a project called The Lounge, a “self-hosted web IRC client”.

The screenshots I saw of the project were enough to win me over. I was able to get it installed on a VPS I already had without a fuss since it’s just a self-contained Node app.

It’s definitely the most modern and easiest to use IRC client I’ve tried, but the icing on top is that it’s always connected so I can go back and read channel history whenever I get on.

Maybe check it out if you’re into IRC and self-hosting. And if you know of any channels or networks I’d be interested in, let me know! So far I’m in #gemini on tilde.chat and some channels on libera.chat for various projects I use.