I have been in a group chat with 2 of my closet friends for more than 10 years now, and we have been using Facebook messenger for that entire time. However, there has always been interest in migrating to a different platform, but so far we have not been able to land on a good alternative. We have gotten very used to some of the messenger features and have disliked alternatives for lacking these features. I was wondering if anyone could suggest some solutions here, up to and including a DIY (maybe IRC?) approach.

The features we really liked from messenger:

• Nicknames, and ability to tag by nickname
• Emoji hotkey (where you have quick access to a selected emoji, we use this for a lot of in-jokes)
• Chat theme and customization
• easy cross-platform or browser based (we are a mix of mac/pc, and iphone/android users)

Features we really do not need and in fact get in the way:

• Different channels or rooms
• voice/video
• screen sharing

Features that aren't necessary but could be nice:

• bots

Does anyone have suggestions for alternatives to messenger that hit these points? We have tried Discord, but found it was way too feature heavy for how we use it, and lacked some really basic features we liked from messenger. Whatsapp was a decent replacement, but lack of themes and emoji hotkey made it less enjoyable for us than messenger, plus it is also a Meta platform which eliminated one of the main reasons we wanted to switch.

I have half a mind to set up an IRC channel for us, but it's been many years at this point since I've used IRC, so I don't know what that ecosystem is like these days, and how easy it would be to get my non-tech-savvy friends on board.

(perhaps this is better suited to ~tech, but I am posting here with an eye towards DIY solutions, although to reiterate I would also be happy with an out-of-the-box alternative)

Let me start by saying this is a space I am not at all familiar with. I didn't grow up with IRC, my first text editor was Sublime (I'm not from the "EMACS vs. VIM" generation,) so I feel kinda outta touch with what all is going on.

Is there a winner? I feel invested in this topic after seeing a whole slew of posts, blogs, and medium articles posted all over Reddit and HN breaking down how these folks have personally been impacted over the past month or so. It seems to have died down which leaves me with the question of what the outcome was. An even 50/50 split? Libera destroying Freenode? Or Freenode able to hold onto users by successfully preventing efforts to organize a transition?

Without being in the Freenode community, I don't have a feeling for whether Freenode is dead, Libera Chat is "winning" and I don't think there's a good way to get metrics either.

Anyone in this world who can help the uneducated out on the outcome of all of this?

I'm just curious how many people still use IRC (Internet Relay Chat) here. And if you use it, what do you use it for? Is there anything (server/channels, etc) that you would recommend to others?

I use it a bit, mostly for casual chatting on tildeverse.org servers, the SDF server, or on Freenode. On Freenode, I also use it when I need to interact with FOSS developers who use IRC as one of their main forms of support.

I recently floated this idea in a comment elsewhere, but I wanted to gauge interest in having an unofficial Tildes IRC channel. The purpose of this channel would just be general, casual discussion with other users of Tildes about anything, and particularly those topics which may not warrant an entire thread on the site here. I know that these days IRC isn't the most popular chat option, with things like Discord filling the void. However IRC is appealing in that users can choose between multiple clients, and in that such a Tildes channel would not need many of the features offered by Discord. How would people feel about such a space?

#tildes:matrix.org

So there are many, many Matrix clients but the most popular one seems to be Riot which is available on iOS, Android (F-Droid, Play Store), and as a web app which you can join by clicking the link above.

It's similar to Discord in the features it offers, but being open source I thought it might be more in the spirit of Tildes than some of the proprietary alternatives.

That being said I'll be the first to admit Riot is a bit rough around the edges and Matrix seems to be under both heavy load and development. If there's demand for it I should be able to get a dedicated server up since it's an optionally federated service.

Oh, and as a bonus the Matrix chat links with the Tildes IRC channels (#tildes and ##tildes) on freenode, so there's that. (Thanks @tyil)

Don't forget to visit @Kat's wonderful ~tech wiki for links to other options such as Discord and Telegram if them's more your fancy.

Happy wordsing!