People still use our old-fashioned Unix login servers

We have these at work and there was a big outcry when IT tried to get rid of them. I use them from time to time to do things like: Keep git and other backups. Convenient place to scp files to/from. Upload files that coworkers can grab. I don't use it, but others used them as permanent IRC endpoints (using screen or tmux presumably).

Notice a cloud VM or container probably doesn't work here. You need something with a permanent presence, and shared between users (with separate Unix accounts).

Using IRC for the company IM is true old-school. I've worked at places which do the same, and also use SIP for A/V calls. Not being dependent on Big Tech, or the Internet for that matter, for services which exist entirely inside the corporate LAN is a great way to work.

It was replaced by Slack last year. Sigh ...

We still use IRC in some upstream communities although it has been replaced by Matrix in some (which is also terrible).

Hmm, a VPS with Copyparty might work, although security would be in question compared to an internal unix login server..

Matrix the protocol seems fine, but client software seems to be all web views or (weirdly) imitating the look of web views.

Fractal for GNOME is neither, and it’s decent.

I want a text only client, running in a terminal. I don't care that I won't be able to see the pictures & animations - in fact that's an advantage.

It does look and work very much like a web view. I just tried it.

Uh, how?.. It’s a conversation window with a contact list to the left, with GNOME-standard (libadwaita) look and feel. If you want separate conversation windows (like ICQ or Pidgin), then I understand the desire, but it’s pretty much orthogonal to web-view-ness (also very rare these days regardless of protocol).

The emacs client is nice, ement.el, is nice. And there's probably a weechat plugin somewhere.

We moved off IRC to Slack ages ago. Then they decided Slack was too expensive so we were forced to Teams which is bundled with the inescapable O365 license. We now use IRC again (UnrealIRCd) which runs on a debian VM on someone's workstation in the office.

Clients are all irssi on WSL2 or Macs.

What's the difference between this and a Ubuntu running on EC2 with various users and SSH?

Mostly annoying network configs and token expirations etc. Not saying it can't be set up well, but in my experience some security guru gets a hardon for making my life miserable.

https://weechat.org/ -- supports matrix (as well as IRC).

That depends... If your AWS account is already wired up the internal network then the ec2 is basically just another VM just like the onprem VMware servers or physical machines.

Now if all your AWS accounts are only public facing then yes it can get a bit more complicated .

Yes this is fair. I'm even using Weechat for IRC & Slack, so I just need to get around to setting it up.

irssi is surprisingly decent, and would even makes you think IRC the protocol was designed around irssi (and TUI), although the protocol is actually much older

Maybe Adwaita looks like that, I don't know. But there is a ton of whitespace, lots of clickable UI elements that look just like regular text, that kind of thing.