I finally got around to setting up an IRC client on my home PC, so I could lurk on the IndieWeb channels. I don’t think I’ve used IRC in around 15 years, so it was a bit of an adventure! My Gnome installation came with 2 different clients – HexChat and Empathy (the Gnome Project’s chat client). HexChat was by far the easier to setup; Empathy required me to install a whole other package, which I only found out after I had to search online to troubleshoot why I wasn’t getting the option to add accounts of any type whatsoever.
Once it was setup though, I found Empathy just that little bit nicer to use and read (at least, on “stock” settings). For mostly just following along, that’s probably enough.
Now I’m connected, I’m reminded why I like IRC: it’s slow, low stress communication. The only thing I need to care about is what’s written during the time I’m connected to a room, and there’s no annoying ping or notification on each message (or even if I’m mentioned). If I disconnect, my client won’t display what I missed when I reconnect – and I’m perfectly fine with that. I don’t (won’t) have a client on my phone, so IRC will be that thing I can only hang out in when I’m at my desktop. How very retro 😎
Had a very similar experience with installing HexChat again after years of not being on IRC – in the early 2000s I was in a game – clan and we hung out in our chat-room on Quakenet all the time – I even kept the chat logs and generated stats on a web page. Unfortunately I lost those in a HD crash years ago.
Following the Indieweb on IRC can also be achieved when you’re not on your PC as the channels and messages are reposted to this site almost instantaneously: https://chat.indieweb.org/meta/
It’s great to keep track of what is been talked about and the integration of Loqi (the friendly irc bot) and the Twitter mentions of Indieweb related topics, makes it the perfect news source for indieweb-related matters.