cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/14931443
More than three years have passed since the last release of ngIRCd – a free, portable and lightweight Internet Relay Chat server for small or private networks – and more than 130 individual patches have accumulated in the Git “master branch” in the meantime. Some are cosmetic, some bring new functionality, others improve the documentation or fix bugs. All in all, it’s more than time for the next “big” release of ngIRCd!
And here it is, ngIRCd release 27! 🎉 https://github.com/ngircd/ngircd/releases/tag/rel-27
It’s still pretty popular for most FOSS communities and the only way to get live support by the community, so yes, very much so.
The big advantage is you don’t need to sign up for anything, zero terms and conditions to agree too, zero personal information to give away unlike Discord which now wants phone numbers and such for most servers.
For some IRC networks this isn’t necessarily true. Many channels on Libera for example require nick registration before you can join and/or participate in chat. And that registration process blocks MANY legitimate email services including, sometimes, gmail (they don’t like it if you have dots in your username for example).
And even if you get past that, now you must often deal with toxic moderators and jaded/elitist lurkers that abuse people for asking the “wrong” questions.
Do you have examples? Most communities I know are on discord…
They are older, more system level projects. See libera and OFTC.
To counter your experience Ive only seen emulators use Discord.