this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2026
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My problem with irc was not remembering to connect and it not being persistent, so when I did show up it'd be empty unless it just happened to be in the middle of others talking. But I did want to get into it.
IRC is older than World Wide Web, and unfortunately there wasn't as much innovation over years.
It was designated for a live chat so thought of also storing history and replay it didn't make sense then (the reasoning was that if you needed to send something that's not live, why not use email?)
Though people come up with own adhoc solutions like for example mentioned bouncer, some networks also had memo service where you could leave a message and there were also bots sitting chat history.
If features like these are important to you, I didn't think you will be happy with IRC, adding them would require rearchitecting the whole thing.
You can see for example slack doing it (it is heavily influenced by IRC although it evolved so much that maybe that is less visible now)
I didn't have a chance to play with it yet, but I heard Matrix could be the successor to IRC.
Nothing against IRC, I spent years on it and loved it, but it isn't great if important features for you are things like chart history when you were offline, embedding pictures in chat, threads, audio/video chat etc
The things where IRC still rules is: simplicity, very low resource requirements, and no accounts need, just pick a nick and you are in (this is also why keeping history for each user is so hard to add, when servers didn't really handle accounts.)
That can be solved with a bouncer. The bouncer stays connected and loads chat history, when you do connect. :)
Maybe it was just the server I tried, but I could never get it to work. Or maybe I configured it wrong 🤷🏼♂️
How's mobile support?
Some bouncers need to have the chat history replay set to enabled, some clients need a plugin to replay the history. I use Soju+weechat and had to do a bit of configuring to get it to work, but now it does work fine. Also, some channels have a server side history replay enabled, for example, in our network the main channel replays automagically 15 last messages and you can do a command to replay the last 100 messages.
Mobile support has improved a lot lately. There is a couple of users on the network who only use mobile to chat. Personally I don't use any, so I can't say much about it.