[esotericn]

I've used IRC pretty much forever.

I use it for, err, online chat. If I want real-time chat I do it there.

None of the other platforms offer anything other than fragmentation of the user base as far as I'm concerned.

I don't care about the fact that like, you need to run a client all the time, ten year old me was leaving his computer on before he knew what a server even was, I do it anyway because I self host a ton of stuff (for basically the same reasons, almost everything else is proprietary and wanky in some way).

[garren]

Is there a particular client you use or would recommend? I’ve used irssi on and off in the past, and bitchx occasionally, but I’d be curious to know what’s popular today.

[robotmay]

I quite like Quassel, which doesn't seem to get discussed much. Has the ability to run the core and client on separate machines, decent customisation etc. I run the core on my home server and connect to it from elsewhere.

[esotericn]

I use weechat nowadays but it's all much of a muchness really.

It would be nice if weechat could connect to itself as a relay, my understanding is that it still can't. As a substitute I run it in tmux and connect to that.