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The Lounge – Modern web IRC client designed for self-hosting
- jeroenhd 6y agoI used this a few years back. My only grips with it are the usual NodeJS application gripes (too many dependencies etc.), the UI is clean, the interface is responsive and configuration is easy. I'd personally switch to a Matrix bridge + Riot if I were to need to access IRC these days, but for anyone seeking a nice self-hosted method of accessing IRC from the browser without intermediate software, I can strongly recommend this.
- mobilemidget 6y agoCan you also in a nutshell tell me/us how the 'Always connected. Remains connected to IRC servers while you are offline.' works? Can't find much on the site itself, and tbh don't want to scroll the source code.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- wffurr 6y agoYou run Lounge on a server that remains connected. You then connect to Lounge with mobile apps or a URL. The official site is more useful than the GitHub repo in this regard: https://thelounge.chat/docs https://thelounge.chat/docs
- jeroenhd 6y agoThe NodeJS backend keeps connected and syncs up the messages to the frontend when you reconnect. The actual IRC happens on your server, the frontend has a separate API for fetching messages (it doesn't do IRC directly).
- mobilemidget 6y agoaaah okay so it functions as a bouncer :) was a bit confusing as they mention 'forget' bouncers :) thanks for the update
- dstaley 6y agoThe Lounge is the first app to make me really use IRC. The ability to have it running on my home server and be easily accessible from all the devices in my house through a nice, mobile optimized web interface is an absolute delight.
- josteink 6y agoIf that amazes you, you’ll be even more impressed with Matrix + Riot/Element and IRC-bridges (plus lots of other bridges of course).
- dstaley 6y agoI'm already a Matrix/Element user, and I honestly don't see the point in using a bridge for my personal IRC usage. I think it's cool for groups that want to maintain IRC after switching to Matrix, but it feels like it's a bit too much complexity to use Matrix as a UI for IRC.
- josteink 6y agoFair enough. For me, Matrix was not just about bridging IRC, but about unifying communications. And when you first decide to do that, bridging IRC too becomes a no-brainer.
- smonff 6y agoReminds me a bit of [Convos](https://convos.chat/ https://convos.chat/), a nice Perl based client.
- Naac 6y agoIt's actually a fork of shout https://github.com/erming/shout https://github.com/erming/shout
- nmaleki 6y agohttps://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat Rocket chat aswell
- xellisx 6y agoUgh. I tried to get color support added (full rgb and the 16 mIRC named colors), but the PR sat there for years and I ended up removing the PR.
- riffic 6y agoAnother Perl client from back in the day: https://github.com/leedo/alice https://github.com/leedo/alice
- curiousfab 6y agoWhat I don't understand about these "modern" apps is that users simply seem to accept that they waste megapixels of screen real estate for nothing. This has always put me off from using these, so still "stuck" with irssi + screen and (if no ssh) CGI:IRC.
- innocenat 6y agoI was looking at the screenshot on the linked page, and I failed to see where you think the megapixels were wasted? The channel list? Or the alignment of username/message?
- curiousfab 6y agoYes, channel list, user list, lots of white space next to the usernames, for my taste there's also excessive spacing between the single message lines, the channel topic line could take up half of the space, and so on. I know that many modern apps follow this pattern and it may have to do with making things responsive and work well across many different devices and platforms, but I simply cannot be happy with low information density. YMMV. It's good that there are so many different clients to chose from. IRC still rocks.
- xPaw 6y agoAt some point if you have too little spacing, everything becomes very crowded. That being said, The Lounge supports themes, and it's trivial to reduce spacing to fit your needs. There's even a box in settings where you can put custom css directly in.
- innocenat 6y agoSo you used irssi without both channel list and user list? I mean, HexChat use roughly the same space (the username part is configurable), so this is hardly a problem of 'modern UI'. (XChat, which HexChat fork from, was initially released in 1999)
- 6y ago
- gramakri 6y agoNote that it's not just a client but a irc bouncer. Like znc and quassel.
- iforgotpassword 6y agoQuassel isn't a traditional bouncer though. It doesn't proxy the IRC protocol but uses a custom one between core and client, so you can properly run multiple clients connected to one core, and it will synchronize the read/unread state, highlights etc. between clients. I prefer it over the lounge because it's not web based. I'm old and hate everything web based.
- gramakri 6y agoAh, good to know. Is that a requirement that the client and the core talk IRC to qualify as a bouncer? I guess that will also rule lounge as a bouncer since afaik it talks HTTP and not IRC. ZNC is a proper bouncer then.
- tenebrisalietum 6y agoWell back in the day your connection to a university shell account might have been through dialup, so using the low-bandwidth IRC protocol to talk to the BNC was perfect.
- iforgotpassword 6y agoI don't think there is a formal definition, but for the longest time that's how it has been, so people might assume they can just use any IRC client to connect to the bouncer, so it might be worth pointing that out for clarification when talking about the lounge or quassel.
- heavyset_go 6y agoThere's also a Quassel web front end here[1]. I prefer the way Quassel handles IRC, so I use the daemon and various front ends, including the web one. [1] https://github.com/magne4000/quassel-webserver https://github.com/magne4000/quassel-webserver
- tenebrisalietum 6y agoI played around with this and love it. Setting up to work with a locally running ircd was a breeze (in contrast to setting up the ircd itself). It even allows you upload pictures which are stored and accessed via the embedded web server. You do need an optional database installed if you want conversation history to persist, and this is needed to really make it useful on mobile.
- xPaw 6y ago> You do need an optional database installed if you want conversation history to persist sqlite installs by default (unless something went wrong), but it's only required to persist between restarts (or leaving and reopening a channel). But just having it running will keep history in memory (up to a limit), so not strictly required to have it work between devices.
- ddevault 6y agoHey, sorry for the tangent, but while I have you here - would you ever consider adding a hosted option for The Longue? I might be interested in collaborating on that on behalf of sourcehut.
- ipnon 6y ago>Cross platform. It doesn't matter what OS you use, it just works wherever Node.js runs. Is Node the new JVM?
- KaiserPro 6y agoI've had lounge for a while, running on the home server. its great that I can keep it open at work on the browser, or on the phone. its got all the features I need, and its as fast as pigeon, more or less.
- alexgaribay 6y agoI've been using The Lounge for quite some time as my IRC client. I run it in a Docker container. Its run really smoothly with no issues. I've been very happy with it.
- orliesaurus 6y agoSame setup, 0 complaints!
- myself248 6y agoSame here! I had a little hiccup because the prebuilt Docker container wasn't built for ARM and I was running it on a raspberry pi, but I got that sorted and it's been stable for months. I guess I should learn how to upgrade the thing, as I understand there've been some nice features added!
- xPaw 6y agoLatest version has prebuilt images for ARM now :)
- dang 6y agoIf curious see also 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18406684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18406684 2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12063689 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12063689
- IceWreck 6y agoI've been running this for over a year now. The best part is, apart from being a bouncer I can access IRC from multiple devices, with the same account. Even on mobile, without the need to install anything.
- spapas82 6y agoI use weechat for the same (more or less purpose): Run weechat through tmux or screen (so it won't stop when you disconnect your ssh session) on an always on server and connect to all your IRC channels. Then use an ssh tunnel to connect to that weechat instance with glowing bear on your computer or weechat android on your mobile. Profit.
- Naac 6y agoI think the mobile story for thelounge is simpler. Just visit the same url using your mobile browser and everything Just Works.
- chaz6 6y agoThis works just fine too in Glowing Bear on my phone (Firefox on Android 10). https://github.com/glowing-bear/glowing-bear https://github.com/glowing-bear/glowing-bear
- the_duke 6y agoThis looks great. Kudos to the authors! The available options are pretty lacking. I would have loved to have this the past few years. I recently shifted all my IRC usage to Matrix with Element. There is a official IRC bridge. It will let you authenticate with IRC servers and join rooms, which will appear as regular Matrix rooms for you. On the IRC side you seem like a normal user as well. You get multi-device support, history, one less client to keep open, ... Steps: * Start a conversation with "@appservice-irc:matrix.org" * Send commands: !nick irc.freenode.net mynickname !storepass irc.freenode.net MYPW !join chat.freenode.net #someroom
- hestefisk 6y agoWhat plugin for Synapse do you use?
- ptman 6y agoPlugin? Bridge? https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/wiki/Bridged-IRC-networks https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/wiki/Bri...
- Arnavion 6y ago>On the IRC side you seem like a normal user as well. Until you accidentally start using Matrix features that don't translate well. Eg your matrix client will let you post large messages. On the IRC side this will generally appear as foo[m] send a long message: <https://matrix.org/some/long/url/uNiQuEcOdE> <foo[m]> How do I fix this? and now IRC users have to open a browser to answer your question. Also I've heard that if a Matrix user edits their message, the bridge resends the whole message to the IRC channel. I've not experienced Matrix users repeating themselves with tiny differences, so I can't confirm this. Thankfully this is rare, at least in the channels I hang out in. But in general I have a dim view of all these protocols that attempt to interop with IRC - they all have some form of impedance mismatch that causes jank. The worst one was probably gitter, where its users were used to posting kilobytes of code in markdown code fences because the browser UI would collapse it by default so it'd look fine, but their IRC bridge sent the whole thing line-by-line to all clients. And if the gitter user edited that code block, the bridge would send the whole code block down again. I disconnected from that thing as soon as it happened to me (The fact that its IRC impl was broken and required me to patch my client was also part of the reason.)
- phre4k 6y agoRelevant xkcd: Team Chat https://xkcd.com/1782/ https://xkcd.com/1782/
- kevinmobrien 6y agoI switched to a self-hosted (on AWS) inspircd instance with The Lounge running in front of it for friends earlier this year. It’s nice. The biggest issue was getting a native-like experience on iOS and Android phones, and discovering that safari doesn’t support notifications.
- xellisx 6y agoI like mIRC.
- heavyset_go 6y agoThere is also Quassel-Web, the web front end for Quassel Core, over here[1]. The Linux Server guys packaged it for self-hosting here[2]. [1] https://github.com/magne4000/quassel-webserver https://github.com/magne4000/quassel-webserver [2] https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-quassel-web https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-quassel-web
- asymmetric 6y agoFYI, push notifications don’t work on iOS: > Push notifications are supported on all platforms except for iOS, due to Apple not supporting web push specification and all browsers being reskins of Safari. From https://thelounge.chat/docs/usage https://thelounge.chat/docs/usage