Machines that can't run Matrix is a pretty small subset. There's a Matrix plugin for Weechat, so you should be able to connect from anything with roughly the power of a Raspberry Pi. Probably slightly less than that; but yeah, you're probably not going to have a good time trying to use an ESP32 as a client. I don't see that as a huge drawback.

> There's a Matrix plugin for Weechat

There are two:

* https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix is in maintenance mode, and in beta according to https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/weechat-matrix/

* https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix-rs is a "work in progress and doesn't do much yet"

There's also an older Lua version: https://github.com/torhve/weechat-matrix-protocol-script

But we shouldn't held UX ransom by such hardware. Martix has TUI clients too.

Currently playing with Matrix a bit and I have to say that most of the TUI clients are pretty terrible still. The desktop clients are not much better, they either have mobile UI but on desktop or are quite buggy still. And what they all have in common is that they are quite slow as well, despite local homeserver running off an nvme ssd.

None of the ones I have tried come even close to UX of pretty much any desktop IRC client.

weechat-matrix should be pretty great, given the TUI is... well, weechat, which is a pretty great IRC TUI?

That had some weird interactions with some of the other scripts I was running. There were some known incompatibilities that were still being worked on - and now it's being rewritten in rust? In any case, I wasn't having a great time with the python version of it.

So went with a more native TUI application (gomuks) and didn't really enjoy that either (scrolling broken, weird mouse behavior, unread messages got stuck on some channels and in other rooms it didn't show any unread messages at all, stuck room that I already left and some other issues that annoyed me).

Then I thought I give some desktop applications a go (quaternion, spectral, nheko, mirage and last I tried was neochat) and they fell into roughly two categories: ok-ish UX but too buggy to be usable or work but have UI designed for mobile but on desktop (which is a no-go for me).

That's where I am with my quest for a decent matrix client. I haven't tried _all_ desktop clients yet, but there are not that many non-electron/browser based ones left I think.

>which is a pretty great IRC TUI?

Catgirl, or some patched mpu irc.

It really doesn't. The best option is weechat-matrix, but that's already a dead project. The lack of good client diversity is what is holding me back from using Matrix.

Dead is overstating it. The maintainers are moving new feature development to a Rust rewrite, weechat-matrix-rs, but still accepting bugfixes/etc to the current Python codebase

Hmm. Given we got here by talking about people who can't (rather than won't) run heavyweight GUI clients, a Rust rewrite seems like it misses the point.

That is, I'm sure it makes sense for them, and for most of their actual users, because Rust is nice, but if I have an m68k machine, too bad, there is no Rust for m68k (unless I'm reading the platform support chart wrong) and so this rewrite likely orphans me.

Now, if for a Debian channel, even a Debian channel about an attempt to port Debian to m68k, then I have no doubt your users all have something less stupid, maybe ARM or x86-64 or even PowerPC. They prefer a non-GUI for their own reasons but ultimately Matrix is an option.

But if you're a channel for actual m68k "classic" Amiga you might actually have a non-trivial number of users for whom "it doesn't run on m68k" is a showstopper. They have an IRC client today.

Rust doesn't target barely-capable archaic platforms like Motorola 68xxx or 80286 and I don't think it should start. But that means we have to accept that a Rust client won't support those platforms.

I'm not seeing classic Amiga on Python's supported platforms either: https://www.python.org/download/other/

I doubt it would perform well even if you did get it running.

So this isn't a change in platform support.

Fair point.

weechat-matrix is really not a dead project. the maintainer works for Element, and is working on matrix-rust-sdk (and thus weechat-matrix-rs), but weechat-matrix is alive in well and in no way unmaintained or dead.

Okay, but I'm not going to go through the effort of setting up weechat-matrix if I know I'm going to need to later throw all that effort away and switch to weechat-matrix-rs. I'll just wait for the latter. It is, for my purposes, dead.

I like IRC a lot but I don't see this as an advantage of IRC. To a first approximation, zero people are connecting to IRC via netcat.

It's an example on the trivialness on using it, you can get a client anywhere, like gopher.

SSL/TLS is broken and you need help over IRC? No problem. Your main PC broke and all you have is a 486/Amiga/Atari or even some PDA connected to the router with a gateway? No issues again.

You just have a installed base, your pkg manager is broken and all you have is netcat, a shell and Unix utilities? Go on.

>SSL/TLS is broken and you need help over IRC? No problem. Your main PC broke and all you have is a 486/Amiga/Atari or even some PDA connected to the router with a gateway? No issues again.

>You just have a installed base, your pkg manager is broken and all you have is netcat, a shell and Unix utilities? Go on.

I understood what you meant. But when would any of those scenarios occur and you don't have your phone, and thus access to Matrix/Discord/whatever?

IRC has awful UX on a phone, and I say this as a guy with a sophisticated weechat+Pushbullet setup going on. The benefits of being able to get on IRC from your NetBSD toaster aren't really benefits at all because you always have a phone. Users want slack/discord-like presence. They want push notifications on hilights. They don't want to have to futz about with znc or tmux+irssi.

IRC failed to keep up with the tastes of modern users and that's why it's been slowly hemorrhaging users for 15 years.

> They want push notifications on hilights.

Huh? Pretty much all mobile irc clients have that though?

And if you are running weechat anyway, something like weechat-android might be an better option for you? That connects back to weechat using the weechat relay protocol.

>Pretty much all mobile irc clients have that though?

Sure but the connection drops a lot if you roam, if you close the app you don't stay connected, etc. Discord does not have this problem.

>And if you are running weechat anyway, something like weechat-android might be an better option for you?

You're missing the point. I already run weechat-android but it's not about me. It's about people who have grown up accustomed to more modern and mobile-friendly applications. If the only way to get multi-device sync with push notifications is to run weechat in a tmux on a shell and install/sign up for Pushbullet, that's awful UX. Too much friction, to say nothing of the idea that the best way to use IRC is to sign up for a third party shell account.

I hate discord but it's a breeze to onboard people to your server.

> Sure but the connection drops a lot if you roam, if you close the app you don't stay connected, etc. Discord does not have this problem.

Yeah that mobile networking is completely broken is a bit unfortunate. But at least the staying connected in the background part works just fine for me (Also works fine with my jabber client).

Not sure why you still need pushbullet if you are already using weechat-android though (and not saying that I would recommend that for everyone.. something like IRCCloud is more suitable for non-technical people I would say). Or is it weechat-android specifically that has the problem of not being able to run in the background for you?

Weechat-android might not drop because it's a relay client. But try running a non-relay client and see how it goes.

Anyways it's like you're intentionally missing the point. I'm not here for tech support with my setup. I'm trying to explain why IRC's user experience is inferior to Discord for most users.

I tried with a normal IRC client on Android. And like I said it also works with my Jabber client, which I have been running for years now and never had problems with missed notifications or anything there, despite it also requiring a open TCP connection to work.

The only thing is it's less nice for the _other_ irc users in the channels if they don't have filtering setup to get rid of those extra joins/quits if you are in a bad connectivity area (unless you are running a server that itself hides them). But for onboarding that makes no difference at all.

However the sore points come a bit later with most servers having no server-side history, integrated bouncer, etc. (which would all require a bouncer or tmux+weechat, which I totally agree is not for everyone)

If you want all that you are limited to exactly one ircd currently (Oragono) that has integrated bouncer (so no need to run weechat/znc to stay "connected"), server side history (same history on all your devices and also not loosing anything on disconnect) and multi-session support (being online with multiple clients using same nick). Some of those features are slowly diffusing to other ircds and from there to irc networks, but that takes time.