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IRC is having its second wind as far as I can tell. Libera is very active and it offers an experience that is unlike the over-stimulating chat apps like discord.

Some projects have both a discord and an IRC channel and when you compare the two chats the conversations are wildly different — IRC being a more focused, on topic chat without floods of gifs, emojis, and off-topic channels.

The hardest part about using IRC is getting chat history and mobile notifications. As part of https://pico.sh we run a soju bouncer (soju.im) for our members to use to help with that. We have a bunch of daily active users.

Seeing hexchat always gives me a pang of nostalgia for hours spent as a teen on various IRC channels. I know that even if I went back to some of those servers I wouldn't be able to recapture the same "magic" since it was primarily the people there (and besides, those people are largely reachable on slightly more modern services these days), but I do miss the simplicity of IRC as a protocol and the massive variety of clients and interfaces.

Maybe matrix will recapture some of that platform-agnosticism? I haven't used it in a while and the general sentiment around the protocol seems vaguely negative these days (at least in channels like HN).

Sadly it seems like it is down

    Connected to example.fi.
    Escape character is '^]'.
    /home/example/services/ircd/ircd.sh: fork: retry: Resource temporarily unavailable

I've heard IRC servers jokingly referred to as "layer 7 multicast routers."

Given the source isn't released, how about an IRCd in bash: https://github.com/dgl/bash-ircd

A couple decades ago I remember somebody using awk in programming competitions, as a stunt, and doing surprisingly well. For tasks involving text processing it has a huge advantage, and it ends up doing ok with other stuff.

> it's made with gawk.

gawk is always best when served live.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXHuygyyulE&t=53s

I am such a fan of minimal, text-forward, straight to the point website designs like this. I feel like it makes it easier to quickly determine whether the text content is worth reading.

https://libera.chat is what Freenode turned into after Freenode imploded. Really great communities there - F/OSS-centric, yes, but there are good unofficial channels for cloud services, and even some proprietary software and services, like vscode, AWS, Azure, Oracle, etc.

ZNC is an excellent way to keep history between your IRC sessions: https://github.com/znc/znc And WeeChat is an excellent companion to ZNC and libera.chat: https://github.com/weechat/weechat And IRC for Android is an excellent IRC client that also plays well with ZNC: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.countercul... Cheers!

That's funny, and totally not what awk was designed for, but it does it anyway!

This doesn't seem interesting without the code, which I can't find. They said it will be available when "ready". Is it ready yet?

Also, a gemini browser written in AWK:

https://github.com/leovilok/gem.awk

It needs OpenSSL or LibreSSL in order to create network connections.

Which channels should we join? Feeling lonely

Early 2000s, writing your own client to join freenode was a programmer's rite. Sad to see the network implode. And no, I won't use libera or whatever.