[esbeeb]

IRC is not mobile-friendly (and I have to regretfully admit we live in a push-notification-requiring sort of world now).

Myself, I needed something IRC-like, which was open-source, and mobile friendly, so I tried Mattermost team server for a few years. What turned me off over time was that it required manual upgrades. I would have preferred something which was a nice, tidy Debian package.

Now I've turned to the prosody XMPP server instead, which is a standard Debian package (and now upgrades itself, if and only if, there are security problems, with Debian's "unattended-upgrades"). It runs on a $5US/month VPS. Setting up all the SSL stuff, and firewalling rules - as it uses multiple ports - did take a few days to figure out!

PS: A similar discussion around merits/demerits of IRC was recently on mastodon here: https://hachyderm.io/@miah/112649146585492861

I made a couple of related comments (WRT prosody, and Mattermost Team server): https://c.im/@sbb/112673859554591548 https://c.im/@sbb/112673727757562126

[mariusor]

One of the former SourceHut developers has worked on a pretty good mobile client: Goguma. https://f-droid.org/packages/fr.emersion.goguma/

[johnea]

Plenty of people use IRC on mobile, not sure what you mean by "not friendly"...