There seem to be plentiful options for text chat servers, so I’m curious for those that self-host their own, what their preferences & experiences have been with them.

Also those mentioned in the title were just a few examples, if you run something else, e.g. Revolt or Mattermost or something else less popular, would be interested in reading about it!

  • @[email protected]
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    121 year ago

    I’m in a irc channel with a bunch of internet friends. I like how ancient it is, it reminds me of the old internet. The limitations are severe however and I would never suggest to anyone to use IRC as a text chat server. Without these people and the nostalgia I would go for matrix I think.

      • The Stoned Hacker
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        51 year ago

        I both love and hate this. I love to see IRC getting some love and these features are massive QoL improvements. I say this as a regular IRC user. On the other hand though, no touch da fishy.

        • @[email protected]
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          1 year ago

          They do maintain the simplicity of the line oriented protocol, so I’m fine with that. :)

          That’s the strongest point of IRC, IMO, and why it’s kept so simple : every instruction is a plain text line, period. It makes it incredibly simple to build on top of it. You don’t need to introduce a dependency to a project that probably will be abandonned in a few years, at which point you’ll have to rewrite your codebase to use an other dependency, for a few years. You just open a TCP connection, you read lines from the socket and write lines to it, each line is its own instruction structured in well known fields, and that’s it. It’s so simple!

          As long as IRCv3 sticks to that, they have my blessing. :)

      • @OldPain
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        21 year ago

        Thanks for mentioning this! Had no idea how much I want this.

        • @[email protected]
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          1 year ago

          Yep, as often, the extension of the standard comes from non standard features developed here are there (as you can see in the participating organizations block, most of the big names are working on this). The difference in ircv3 is that you can expect to see all those features everywhere, instead of having this software implementing this feature, that other one having that other feature, and you have to choose which one is the most important for you. Basically, it’s a rebase of the standard. :)

    • poVoq
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      41 year ago

      https://thelounge.chat/ with any IRC server (but IRCv3 like https://ergo.chat is best) works very nicely, including mobile support and push notifications etc. Also includes a bouncer for full history and a file upload service for image sharing.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 year ago

        Thanks, i do already know the lounge, but I self host quassel and have my own self hosted image sharing solution.

    • @[email protected]OP
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      21 year ago

      The limitations are severe however and I would never suggest to anyone to use IRC as a text chat server.

      I’m a little confused, if all you wanted from it was text chat, isn’t that pretty much exactly what it is as a result of its limitations? Regardless, for the majority of folks I think you’re probably right that it may not be advisable given its limits.

      • @[email protected]
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        31 year ago

        Oh well, there are different implementations of IRC, and some limit you more than others. Flood protection is a pita if you want to share long text, since max message length is not that much. Netsplits are still a thing and your nick can’t be longer than 15 chars. Text formatting works on most servers, but that’s no guarantee. The length of a channel topic is also limited. You interact with the server only through the same messages you send to your chats. You need some kind of bouncer to still follow a chat if offline.