cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/14931443
More than three years have passed since the last release of ngIRCd – a free, portable and lightweight Internet Relay Chat server for small or private networks – and more than 130 individual patches have accumulated in the Git “master branch” in the meantime. Some are cosmetic, some bring new functionality, others improve the documentation or fix bugs. All in all, it’s more than time for the next “big” release of ngIRCd!
And here it is, ngIRCd release 27! 🎉 https://github.com/ngircd/ngircd/releases/tag/rel-27
Is there Still reason to host irc?
It’s still pretty popular for most FOSS communities and the only way to get live support by the community, so yes, very much so.
The big advantage is you don’t need to sign up for anything, zero terms and conditions to agree too, zero personal information to give away unlike Discord which now wants phone numbers and such for most servers.
don’t need to sign up for anything
For some IRC networks this isn’t necessarily true. Many channels on Libera for example require nick registration before you can join and/or participate in chat. And that registration process blocks MANY legitimate email services including, sometimes, gmail (they don’t like it if you have dots in your username for example).
And even if you get past that, now you must often deal with toxic moderators and jaded/elitist lurkers that abuse people for asking the “wrong” questions.
It’s still pretty popular for most FOSS communities
Do you have examples? Most communities I know are on discord…
They are older, more system level projects. See libera and OFTC.
To counter your experience Ive only seen emulators use Discord.
Why not? There aren’t really any good alternatives out there if you want a chat without gifs and embedded images and videos and all that stuff that requires basically a whole web view to render it.
Can you name any popular web-only chat platforms that do not have a (even third-party) way to use the service from the command-line or a simple GUI app? I can’t…
If by “simple GUI app” you mean something that has an embedded web browser then no, otherwise pretty much all of them unless you count the kind of third party clients that might broken at any moment by the platform because they have just reverse engineered the protocol and are not taken into account by the platform at all when making changes.
Exactly. And IRC allows one to very quickly ask a tech question via web IRC chat or IRC client without having to sign up somewhere (Discord, Matrix, Mattermost and so on).
for me bigest issue is to switch from something else
IRC by itself is really ancient and certainly has drawbacks but given the amount of mobile apps, desktop apps and web apps for it and the fact that anyone can easily join as guest without needing to hand out any information (email address, name, phone number) is hard to beat. Things like Discord, revolt.chat, Matrix, SimpleX Chat, Session and team chat like Mattermost, RocketChat, Zulip have their users and its benefits in the open source world.
Yes.
I wonder how it compares with Ergo IRC Server. Seems to take the more minimalistic approach.
a […] software
A software WHAT? There’s a word missing.
hmm? Where did you read that ?
