Shouts actually outdated, I'd checkout the fork The Lounge - https://www.github.com/thelounge/lounge

irccloud keeps going down every time freenode netsplits. It got so bad lately I actually canceled my subscription and instead set up weechat+glowing bear, which is not as polished, but it works fairly well on both desktop and mobile. (And cheaper)

It's also free software and easy to set up so I encourage everybody to check it out.

Does it still work if you've got WeeChat customised or does it need to be vanilla? I'd like to keep using it from a shell while on a decent machine, but would absolutely not mind the option to connect from mobile clients.

Dev here. It's completely independent of your config. Indeed many things carry over to Glowing Bear automatically, such as scripts that modify the lines (colorize_nicks.py) or create new text buffers (like highmon or grep.py), filters, triggers, etc.

Did check it out. Absolutely amazing project and if anyone still reads through this chat, absolutely what a modern IRC experience should be like in my view. Effortlessly does a lot of the things people on here like about Slack.

I like WeeChat as a client, it's fast and lean and works inside the tmux session that pretty governs my digital life both private and professionally. Alas, it's not always accessible. Getting Putty to reliably work with tmuxed ncurses apps is a nightmare for example, imho.

Glowing Bear solves this brilliantly. It looks great, you get features like inline display of media and is easily secured with certificates from Let's Encrypt.

Thank you, devs. This'll make my "newly discovered FOSS projects of the year" list for sure.

Thanks a lot for your kind words :)

Honestly, if I need to use a third party service like irccloud, isn't the benefit of IRC lost at that point? Why use irccloud when I can just use Matrix or Slack?

Because you could swap off irccloud at any time, to another IRC services provider or self-hosting, and not lose touch with the people you're chatting with, because the network layer is independent from your interface (irccloud).

By contrast, if you want to switch off Slack, can you still talk to people who stay on Slack, or do you have to get them to switch too?

I like IRC over Slack for the same reason I like email over Slack: I can just use my client with the interface I like, and the network takes care of getting my message to someone using a different interface, that they like. It doesn't require we compromise on a shared, fixed interface, a la Slack.