IRC as a minimalist Discord alternative — anyone still on it?

Been thinking about this lately. Back in 2009 I basically lived on IRC. EFnet, Freenode, the old gaming channels. Ran my client on a Pentium III box in the corner of my dorm room, connected for weeks straight. They don't make them like that anymore.

Now Discord is everywhere and my phone buzzes every ten minutes with animated avatars and sticker spam. I miss the days when chat was just text. No embeds, no reactions, no "boost this server." Just a nick, a channel, and maybe a bot that told you the weather.

So I'm curious — anyone here still running an IRC channel? Or using a bouncer on a cheap VPS to stay connected? I'm half-tempted to spin one up on my little OVHcloud NAT box just for the vibe. Would love to hear your setups if you've kept the flame alive.

Ran an ircd at 3am last tuesday on a €3 Contabo NAT vps

Anyway its just me and 6 friends, we moved off discord after the third redesign broke the linux client. Using oragono + a znc bouncer I compiled while half asleep. Idk why I do this but it idles at 40MB ram and the logs are just peaceful text files

I wrote a bot that posts when my coffee maker finishes brewing. Thats the entire feature set 💀

Just use weechat + znc on a $2 box and stop complaining about electron bloat

Skill issue if you need "threads" and "reactions" to communicate. Back in MY day we had /me actions and we LIKED it

Seriously though I bridged my personal irc channel to matrix with matterbridge on a Vultr KVM. Works fine. The matrix people are worse than the discord people though 🐧

At least irc doesn't phone home to three analytics domains just because you typed "hello"

I tried mirc once and everyone was gone when I came back

Is that what the bouncer thing does? I looked at znc but the install guide was like 20 steps and I got scared

Also is there a mobile client that works, my friends would never switch if theres no phone app

One moving part beats ten
A bouncer is a small always-on proxy

Your phone talks to it, not the network directly

Twenty years in this business, and I've watched this cycle three times now. Centralized service rises, people flock to it, it enshittifies, the technical crowd scatters to some "minimalist" alternative, then that gets popular and the cycle repeats.

IRC won't save you. Matrix won't save you. The protocol doesn't matter. What matters is who owns the server, and mark my words, if enough people actually used IRC again, someone would find a way to shove NFTs into it. Kids these days think running a bouncer makes them radical. We were doing this on Sun SPARCstations in 1998.

That said, my ZNC instance has been running on the same Hetzner dedicated box since 2019 without a restart. I suppose there's something to be said for software that boring.

Fun little project for you sarah

I had the exact same problem so I threw znc on a RackNerd 512MB NAT box. Took maybe 15 minutes with their debian template. Here's the lazy config if you want it:

ListenPort = 5000
LoadModule = webadmin
<User tinker>
    Pass = yourhashhere
    Buffer = 500
    KeepBuffer = true
</User>

Then I use revolution irc on android, point it at my vps ip. It actually works, ive been connected to #lowendlife for like 3 months straight now. Whole setup costs less than a coffee

The webadmin part means you can add networks from your browser, no more editing weird config files at midnight. Highly recommend