Greetings folks, glad to see this topic is still afoot and IRC still a preferred choice by many!
For those of you who can't decide on which place to join and base your miscellaneous retro-themed projects in, we have got the right thing just around the corner, which should make perfect sense and eliminate any further debates as well as, hopefully, unite all like-minded people under one roof.
Just last year we launched a new network with retro projects in mind, which came to be known as...
...drumroll...
RetroNode
Pretty self-speaking. If you're curious about the story behind it, you can read it here. Overall, I think this is the ultimate abode for all your things retro and it can't get any better than that. Also, I don't think places like libera are going to be around forever, eventually they will either "up" their game (move to discord or create their own chat platform) or bite the dust completely. Already things like ChatGPT are making them and stackoverflow kind of useless if you ask me. We on the other hand have no such plans and intend to stay around for as long as the grass is green and the sky is blue.
So far our network features:
- Secure TLS connection over port 6697
- SASL connection
- Full host cloaking by default (no vhost is needed, but can still be requested and applied on top of the cloak, however)
- URL title resolving bots
Our address is: irc.retronode.org
The homepage is still a bit raw but we are working on it. By the way, if any of you have home servers or VPSs and wish to become a part of the staff crew, you can donate the server and become a part of the staff crew. Easy as that.
Right now we don't really have #vogons on there or #dosbox, but we do have #retroware, which is like a hub for people coming from different machine realms, 8-bit, 16-bit, etc. Feel free to drop in, you might see some familiar faces in there already. Later you can decide on where to go from there.
Incidentally, I would NEVER recommend Undernet for any serious projects nor any older networks in general as they are mostly stagnant, neglected and pretty chaotic at that. Undernet is particularly notorious for being a chaotic cesspool of ddosers and doxxers that aren't even dealt with, as well as pretentious and abusive opers with double standards and their own friendly circles. Moreover, last I checked they didn't even have SASL authentication nor did they seem to care enough about updating their SSL certs. Yes, I've personally spent years on Undernet before, but I would never go back and recommend that dump to any normal human beings today.
That's it for now. Hope this was helpful and welcome to RN!
I am on irc.retronode.org: #retroware