Using IRC in 2026

Software
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IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is having a bit of a revival in one of the communities I participate in (we ditched Discord), but there are not that many clients for Apple devices?

I’m currently using Goguma on mobile and Halloy on desktop, but they both don’t feel like native apps… (technology stack and especially UI/UX)

Today I learned that “Textual has been sunset and will no longer receive updates.” :frowning:

Luckily I recently discovered Mango, which looks very promising. Early TestFlight betas are quite good! (TestFlight invite can be found in an introduction post the developer posted on Reddit earlier today)

Is anyone else here still/again using IRC? Which clients do you recommend?

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In the late 80s I could do IRC from Chicago with colleagues in South Africa using ircll. Life changed forever.

Katie

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Very sad about Textual. It is the best IRC client on Mac right now :frowning:

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I’ve been using ircII since 1993 and still with many of the same friends on the same channel since then. Never saw any reason to use anything else.

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LimeChat not updated since 2020… :disappointed_relieved:

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Textual is still receiving the occasional update, there was one this month - the sunset announcement was a few years ago.
I use it and it works fine.

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So this is not new?

Via: Michael Tsai - Blog - Sunsetting Textual IRC Client

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The original sunset announcement was November 2018, I have the email.
Maybe it’s now fully done, but I haven’t had issues running it.

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Textual doesn’t seem to support many of the newer (draft) IRCv3 features it seems?

And probably never will, if it is sunset :frowning:

Goguma/Halloy/Mango seem to do better on this.

It’s good to see that there’s still active development around IRC!

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Thanks for the heads up on Mango, asked to be added to the beta.

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I use irssi which has been stable for years.

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I still use IRC, I for the past couple of years been paying for IRCCloud, they have a mobile client and on desktop you can use it a PWA.

On mobile there is Igloo for a client, it’s ok. The Textual repo went archive a while ago it’s sad.

That Mango client is interesting I wonder if it supports Soju or ZNC bouncers

edit
Answering my own question Mango does support Soju and ZNC, going to trying to out. It would be nice to not have to pay for IRCCloud anymore.

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No. But I can recommend Matrix.

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irc has privacy issues, hence why I no longer use it. Having said that, without needing privacy it’s a great text only system.

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Which ones?

I know possibly leaking your IP address is one, but the two servers I connect to have a mechanism to prevent that.

And even if they didn’t, they would leak the IP address of the VPS that I run soju (IRC bouncer) on (still unique, but would not leak my real location).

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From what I gather not E2EE, passive logging, and metadata leakage.

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Oh, another “recent” native IRC client I did not know about:

Will probably give it a spin later today, but I doubt that it will replace Mango for me, since that supports both iPhone and iPad as well and is very actively developed (in beta; I think it’s at RC7 now).

EDIT: Briefly tried bIRC, but I definitely prefer Mango.