Comment by kstrauser
7 hours ago
Timely! This weekend I spun up a little friends-only server on a VPS I had laying around. I used Ergo, enforced TLS, enforced authentication, and I hand-create accounts with temp passwords for my chums. For clients, I'm using Halloy on my Mac and Goguma on iOS. Their are other prettier clients, but Ergo and they all support a nice set of IRCv3. For example, they all have client history built in. Whenever I connect, the server replays all the messages I missed while offline (with a 30 day retention), no bouncer required.
Honestly, I'm trying to remember why we collectively moved away from this. I was terminally online in the 90s and the hadn't touched IRC in many years, but this is... actually quite nice.
Back in the day you needed a bnc if you wanted chat history. The mobile experience has been abysmal until very recently.
Also when discord came out there was a certain appeal to having voip built into the same app, and not having to maintain a separate vent/mumble/ts.
The voice thing always sneaks up on me as a requirement, because I never, ever personally want to use that. I'm not saying it's not a good feature, just one that doesn't occur to me. You're probably right, though.
Discord was originally for gamers so most communities I was part of had their own voip servers.
In the 90s it was in game chat, forums, VoIP, possibly an IRC channel. That was a lot of infra to juggle and usually it wasn’t all hosted by the same person. So if xXxDarkNinja69xXx got his feelings hurt he might take down the teamspeak and then your community is up shit creek without a paddle until you can find someone else to host it.
Discord does a merely-okay job of all of that, and possibly Reddit has supplanted the forum bits that discord can’t, but it’s less overhead for the administrators of each community.
I don’t really do any gaming these days so I too don’t use the VoIP, but that was a big part of the allure when discord launched.
Tried Halloy on macOS for ~6mos, has some serious issues ...
(1) It silently disconnects from the server without indication, and does not reconnect. You might assume it is connected, until you send a message and see "message can not be sent". You will lose conversation history unless using a bouncer. Clicking around, all the buffers will clear indicating some major state issue, and you will have to restart it.
(2) Consistently uses ~5% CPU doing nothing at all.
(3) Doesn't behave like a macOS app, pressing the red "close window" button will close the window, but the main process goes ANR.
After leaving Textual since that was discontinued, guess I'm looking for a macOS IRC client again. Might give Mango a try.
Yeah, Halloy is "interesting", although I haven't personally run into issues yet. It just clearly not a native Mac app, which is fine, but not my ideal.
But Textual! I just stumbled across this yesterday: https://www.textualapp.com/news/a-new-chapter
TL;DR someone bought Textual and are restarting development. It's not a PE-style purchase, like a Bending Spoons / Evernote kind of thing. According to the buyers, they bought it because they're heavy users and wanted to take it over so they could resume active development. I always keep a healthy skepticism, but I'm hopeful.
Thanks for the heads-up on Textual!