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This is a bit of a shameless plug, but I just made a Show HN post about Glowing Bear, which is a web front-end for the WeeChat IRC client: https://news.ycombina

This is a bit of a shameless plug, but I just made a Show HN post about Glowing Bear, which is a web front-end for the WeeChat IRC client: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18725038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18725038. It's entirely implemented as client-side javascript, and you can easily self-host it without any requests being made to other servers. For me, it solves the problem of accessing IRC wherever I am without having to fumble with ssh on my phone or monospace text. And it doesn't have the limited functionality of these modern web IRC clients implemented in node because it's just a front-end for WeeChat, which is one of the most powerful IRC clients around. Regarding your note on the path of least resistance leading to centralized solutions---Glowing Bear/WeeChat is definitely more work to set up than just signing up for Slack. You need a machine that runs WeeChat and get a TLS certificate so that the browser will let you connect securely. That definitely limits it to a somewhat nerdy demographic, even among the HN readers ;)

kuschku 8y ago
Weechat (with weechat android and glowingbear), IRCCloud, and Quassel (with Quasseldroid and quassel-webserver) are indeed awesome solutions for IRC. (Personally, I’m ofc biased, as I’m the dev of https://quasseldroid.info/ https://quasseldroid.info/). But I think for these solutions to gain more mainstream appeal, we’d need to make the setup much simpler, and work on ideally making it a single-click solution for an organization to set this up for their members. And maybe even provide hosted services (similar to IRCCloud) for the many users that would rather pay than run their own servers.
- lorenzhs 8y ago
  Yes, you're absolutely correct. Setup is indeed more complicated than it should be for Glowing Bear. I would love to have an automated solution for it, I just don't want to be the one to build it :)

kuschku 8y ago

Weechat (with weechat android and glowingbear), IRCCloud, and Quassel (with Quasseldroid and quassel-webserver) are indeed awesome solutions for IRC. (Personally, I’m ofc biased, as I’m the dev of https://quasseldroid.info/ https://quasseldroid.info/). But I think for these solutions to gain more mainstream appeal, we’d need to make the setup much simpler, and work on ideally making it a single-click solution for an organization to set this up for their members. And maybe even provide hosted services (similar to IRCCloud) for the many users that would rather pay than run their own servers.

lorenzhs 8y ago
Yes, you're absolutely correct. Setup is indeed more complicated than it should be for Glowing Bear. I would love to have an automated solution for it, I just don't want to be the one to build it :)