IRCd service (2024)

Seeing hexchat always gives me a pang of nostalgia for hours spent as a teen on various IRC channels. I know that even if I went back to some of those servers I wouldn't be able to recapture the same "magic" since it was primarily the people there (and besides, those people are largely reachable on slightly more modern services these days), but I do miss the simplicity of IRC as a protocol and the massive variety of clients and interfaces.

Maybe matrix will recapture some of that platform-agnosticism? I haven't used it in a while and the general sentiment around the protocol seems vaguely negative these days (at least in channels like HN).

the main complaints against Matrix atm seems to be that we have made heavy weather of the migration from 1.0 to 2.0 (“either you get a slow client or a fast but incomplete client”)… or that Element has had to focus on building stuff for govts rather than irc-style communities in order to get sustainable. (see also https://gist.github.com/ara4n/190ad712965d0f06e17f508d1a45b5...). Both problems could be much worse, and we had the annual Matrix Conference a few weeks ago which was a great success (https://element.io/blog/the-matrix-conference-a-seminal-mome...), so I suspect/hope the negative sentiment will pass.

I suspect the terribly generic name "Matrix" isn't helping. Guess what's #1 in Google when you search for Matrix, IRC and Discord.