You don't need irccloud to get persistence. There are many bouncers/proxies that let you connect from a device with flaky connections like a phone/laptop, as lo

You don't need irccloud to get persistence. There are many bouncers/proxies that let you connect from a device with flaky connections like a phone/laptop, as long as you have some always-connected machine where you can install things. Some popular ones are ZNC, Weechat, Quassel, Smuxi. Quassel and Smuxi.im are GUI-based ones, where you can start them one one computer and connect from another. (I've never tried them, so can't say how they fare.) I used ZNC for a while, that's a "pure bouncer" that just connects to your irc network and then you connect your client of choice to your ZNC. Simple and easy to set up, but not very featureful. I recently switched to Weechat, which comes with a nice CLI interface, as well as letting you connect from regular IRC clients, or from special Weechat-clients (their own protocol which gives some more control I suppose). There's an HTML5 client https://www.glowing-bear.org/ https://www.glowing-bear.org/ that a lot of people like. I use the Android client https://github.com/ubergeek42/weechat-android#weechat-android-relay-client https://github.com/ubergeek42/weechat-android#weechat-androi... a lot, it's very nice, though from my laptop I connect from Emacs's built in client (M-x erc). I run Weechat on a Raspberry Pi 1 that I had lying around, just connected it to my router, ran "apt install weechat weechat-plugins tmux" and set "tmux new-session -d weechat -s chat" to run on startup, and added a relay: http://www.weechat.org/files/doc/stable/weechat_user.en.html#relay_commands http://www.weechat.org/files/doc/stable/weechat_user.en.html...