This weekend, meeting a lot of people, I noticed how hard it is for us to communicate and organize stuff. Some have Instagram, some have X, both are shitty places not designed for group conversation. Some have Discord, some have WhatsApp, some don’t use the phone, some have no social media, and everything requires you to either provide an email or phone number, create an account, etc, so I thought maybe it would be easier to have something like an IRC room, but it’s been more than 20 years since I last touched IRC and I’m sure there must be newer alternatives around.
Main functionality I’m looking for is casualness (no acc needed) and stored live chat. The ability to pin stuff would be great, maybe create sub rooms and have private chat as well. Do you guys know anything like that?
Eh, everything that tries to “improve” on IRC makes everything more complicated. I have a thelounge installation running that’s connected to our small IRC network. When I want people to chat I drop them a link to it (maybe with a room name) and it drops them right in. thelounge has some improvements to stock IRC (pictures, videos, and links visible in chat), but some of the more advanced functions still demand an account (e.g. there is an inbuilt persistent buffer, but that one is only visible to accounts). I have it running under thelounge.wilderland.ovh and it will drop by default into the #welcome channel.
That sounds amazing, but if I were to self-host it, I’m kinda worried about how it deals with private messages (I didn’t find it mentioned in the docs) - I would like to not have access to private messages.
I have no idea how IRC deals with that stuff. Soulseek has an IRC-like chat (I’m not sure if it’s IRC or something else they created) and private messages are stored locally instead of on the server, which seems ideal.
We also are running our own videochat servers with galène (for ttrpgs), but those don’t have a persistent text chat