danieloaks

GUI-wise there's HexChat, mIRC, Quassel, lots of interesting options to look at.

May be worth digging through these tables a bit more if you're interested: https://ircv3.net/software/clients

We're looking at some new persistence capabilities and caps to speed up connection, which should (hopefully, eventually) provide something similar to that c2s bouncer api in terms of speed: https://github.com/ergochat/ergo/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aiss... Always up to take on and look at suggestions though :D

Right now I'm working with a dev from libera on a client that aims to replicate a lot of things experience-wise from newer chat services. Hoping that with that, smaller self-contained servers can become more of a norm~ But for now, your best bets for finding activity are probably Libera and a couple of the other larger networks.

It's totally fair to make that link, but I very explicitly told everyone over at LTM/H (including PIA and Handshake) that Oragono/Ergo and ircdocs were not work projects in any way. And while I was working on Shells.com, I was very explicit that I wouldn't be touching any IRC stuff for money while there.

But yeah, it's definitely good to be wary of these kinda links, given what happened to snoo's and fn/libera's team. If you wanna ask any more questions about my stuff in particular, feel free to ask here or send me a mail at [email protected]

In terms of strict protocol improvements, the IRCv3 WG is the real place where that's going on, the most authoritative thing in terms of introducing new stuff across the IRC infrastructure these days: https://ircv3.net/

But, for new developers looking to get into IRC today, the resources aren't as available as they could be. Sure, there's a bunch of code to look at, libraries you can use to get started that seem to work fine. But when you wanna start digging into the wire protocol, how particular commands or functions work, how to actually approach writing a client/server from scratch, all you have are either the RFCs, some newer resources like the ircdocs/IRCv3, or stuff spread across 20+ year-old textfiles and pages all across the net. My intention for the documentation side of the Foundation is to build up information on how to use/parse commands and numerics, how widely they're used (in terms of software support), and how to really dig into and approach development with the protocol – since that feels like the more valuable information to be out there right now for new devs. It'll be linked to and public sometime soon, it's just that building up a swathe of documentation large enough to show we're serious about it takes some time (if you want those docs to be decent-quality, at least).

For what it's worth, I'm both the primary writer/maintainer of the Foundation's developer docs work, and the maintainer of the more community effort https://ircdocs.horse/ , so hopefully I'm on the right track with supporting devs in the protocol documentation sense.

If there's any questions or suggestions for directions to take on this (stuff that you, as a dev, would find useful for writing IRC software), please let me know! Even if it's not there for initial launch there's a fair backlog of stuff I'm looking to make up with this project.