All IRC really needs to be brought into the modern world is voice and video chat. I mean, those are the reasons everyone I knew ditched IRC back in the day for shit like Skype and TeamSpeak. It never really needed improvement for the text part. Maybe allowing images to be embedded? Everything else about IRC was, and still is, peak.
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2025
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Discord circa 2018 was pretty much everything I'd want in a modern IRC.
If they can just bring that set of features, I'd switch back to IRC in a heartbeat.
Be the change you want to see in the world
Oldschool Discord really was modern IRC. The creeping enshittification of it over the last 5-6 years has been sad to witness.
I have plans to set up both an IRC server and a Gemeni site on my Raspberry Pi if I can figure out how to get security working on my preferred reverse proxy program.
The internet today is so overwhelming and all I want is the simplicity I felt when I first made my way online as a teen.
I tried hosting a lemmy/piefed instance but I soon learned that I'd have to be a moderator. After hearing stories from other moderators and seeing the types of tools required/requested by moderators, I decided that it's just not worth the effort and loss of sanity.
I was thinking of making a single user instance of piefed once it gets into a more stable place. I ran my own for about a month before just moving over to social/the official one.
Its so nice!
I was considering a single user instance but I noticed just how much data was being transferred throughout the day and decided against it.
I'm drawn to IRC and Gemeni because it seems to use far less data. I've lately been into lowering my electrical power usage while still being able to use the internet. That also includes the type of programs my computer and devices use.
Practical or not, it's been an interesting hobby for myself to learn.
True it federates everything, which can be a bandwidth hog.
You're going to have to moderate IRC too.
It will only be for a select number of people I know and am comfortable with being there. This is going to be hosted on a Raspberry Pi so it's not going to be set up for a large number of people.
I don't want to moderate images or videos which is my main concern when it comes to moderation.
I read the experiences of moderators from the initial CSAM attack on Lemmy and that was already discouraging. I also spent time in PieFed's matrix channel and hearing the additional tools being requested made me realize I just don't want to deal with that at all.
I was more of a usenet type.
Usenet wuz bitchin'. I remember getting a couple of layers deep in the rock heirarchy (was it rock.history.50s-60s? ) and some great discussions, fact- and story- trading with peeps who went deep. Feedback was NOT instant, and so patience and quality were rewarded.
Then those brats with their binaries came along and bye-bye.
I tended to use moos, muds and mushes more than IRC. The servers crashed, but you never had to worry about netsplits.
ooh. I remember a star trek one that was really neat.
You can still get an account at eternal-september.org. There are a few newsgroups that are still active and interesting.
I mean they still existed in the 90's but were filled with shill ad type of postings. Have the postings gotten better?
Better? No, it's still unmoderated. So there's some good stuff and there are twits. It's the wild west out there.
I used IRC a fre years ago. It's "active" but mostly small groups of close friends.
Honestly, I really wish we had an open source version of discord, discord just works. Revolt sounds promising, but I couldn't get the email verification to send on either Yahoo, Gmail, or Proton email. So trying to convince my friends to switch if something that basic doesn't would be a hard sell.
I just downloaded Revolt on Android and the verification email worked fine with my proton account. Might've just been a temporary outage when you tried it.