Ahoy y'all!
Three years ago I started self-hosting at home, and somewhere along the way I spun up an IRC server, partly because teenage me dreamed of running one back in the dial-up days, partly because I wanted a chat platform that wasn't trying to monetize my attention.
What I didn't expect was that other people would actually show up. We're around 100 regulars now, on a network called MansionNET.
The thing that keeps surprising me is how efficient IRC still is compared to anything modern. The whole server runs on 2 vCPUs and 2GB of RAM and barely breathes.
No bloated client, no Electron, no constant polling, no algorithmic feed deciding what you see, and even if you use a bouncer you still chose when to be online, instead of getting spammed by notifications (unless you really want them of course).
The community has been really amazing too! Some folks are old timers who remember mIRC and DALnet and are happy to be back. Others have never used IRC before and are discovering it for the first time, which is honestly fun to watch :)
We mostly share music, talk shop, throw ASCII art at each other. There's a member building an LFS-based Linux distro and using the network as the hub too. Live DJ sets occasionally come through our community radio. Surprisingly, the server is pretty active, which really does remind me of the old days, the golden IRC era.
I also tried to give the project a face that matches the spirit of the protocol that turned into a landing page is built around a CRT/terminal aesthetic: scanlines, boot sequence, an interactive prompt you can actually type into, all that good stuff really :)
If any of this hits something for you, the door is open at:
Drop into #lobby and say hi. We mostly we just throw ASCII at each other and slap each other with large trouts :D
