IRC

What Really IRCs Me: Mastodon

Kyle Rankin — Tue, 09 Jul 2019 12:00:00 +0000

Learn how to use the Mastodon social network platform from the comfort of your regular IRC client.

When it comes to sending text between people, I've found IRC (in particular, a text-based IRC client) works best. I've been using it to chat for decades while other chat protocols and clients come and go. When my friends have picked other chat clients through the years, I've used the amazing IRC gateway Bitlbee to connect with them on their chat client using the same IRC interface I've always used. Bitlbee provides an IRC gateway to many different chat protocols, so you can connect to Bitlbee using your IRC client, and it will handle any translation necessary to connect you to the remote chat clients it supports. I've written about Bitlbee a number of times in the past, and I've used it to connect to other instant messengers, Twitter and Slack. In this article, I describe how I use it to connect to yet another service on the internet: Mastodon.

Like Twitter, Mastodon is a social network platform, but unlike Twitter, Mastodon runs on free software and is decentralized, much like IRC or email. Being decentralized means it works similar to email, and you can create your own instance or create an account on any number of existing Mastodon networks and then follow people either on the same Mastodon network or any other instance, as long as you know the person's user name (which behaves much like an email address).

I've found Bitlbee to be a great interface for keeping track of social media on Twitter, because I treat reading Twitter like I was the operator for a specific IRC room. The people I follow are like those I've invited and given voice to, and I can read what they say chronologically in my IRC room. Since I keep my IRC instance running at all times, I can reconnect to it and catch up with the backlog whenever I want. Since I'm reading Twitter over a purely text-based IRC client, this does mean that instead of animated gifs, I just see URLs that point to the image, but honestly, I consider that a feature!

Since Mastodon behaves in many ways like Twitter, using it with Bitlbee works just as well. Like with Twitter over Bitlbee, it does mean you'll need to learn some extra commands so that you can perform Mastodon-specific functions, like boosting a post (Mastodon's version of retweet) or replying to a post so that your comment goes into the proper thread. I'll cover those commands in a bit.

Installing the Mastodon Bitlbee Plugin

The first step is to install the Mastodon Bitlbee Plugin. This plugin is already packaged for Debian and other distributions—look for the bitlbee-mastodon package. In that case, you can just install it with your package manager. Otherwise, you'll need to clone the source code from the plugin's git repo and build it from source:

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What Really IRCs Me: Slack

Kyle Rankin — Mon, 30 Jul 2018 15:15:38 +0000

by Kyle Rankin

Find out how to reconnect to Slack over IRC using a Bitlbee libpurple plugin.

I'm an IRC kind of guy. I appreciate the simplicity of pure text chat, emoticons instead of emojis, and the vast array of IRC clients and servers to choose from, including the option to host your own. All of my interactive communication happens over IRC either through native IRC channels (like #linuxjournal on Freenode) or using a local instance of Bitlbee to act as an IRC gateway to other chat protocols. Because my IRC client supports connecting to multiple networks at the same time, I've been able to manage all of my personal chat, group chat and work chat from a single window that I can connect to from any of my computers.

Before I upgraded to IRC, my very first chat experience was in the late 1990s on a web-based Java chat applet, and although I hold some nostalgia for web-based chat because I met my wife on that network, chatting via a web browser just seems like a slow and painful way to send text across the internet. Also, shortly after we met, the maintainers of that network decided to shut down the whole thing, and since it was a proprietary network with proprietary servers and clients, when they shut it down, all those chat rooms and groups were lost.

What's old is new again. Instead of Java, we have JavaScript, and kids these days like to treat their web browsers like Emacs, and so every application has to run as a web app. This leads to the latest trend in chat: Slack. I say the latest trend, because it wasn't very long ago that Hipchat was hip, and before that, even Yammer had a brief day in the sun. In the past, a software project might set up a channel on one of the many public or private IRC servers, but nowadays, everyone seems to want to consolidate their projects under Slack's infrastructure. This means if you joined a company or a software project that started during the past few years, more likely than not, you'll need to use Slack.

I'm part of a few Slack networks, and up until recently, I honestly didn't think all that much about Slack, because unlike some other proprietary chat networks, Slack had the sense to offer IRC and XMPP gateways. This meant that you weren't required to use its heavy web app, but instead, you could use whatever client you preferred yet still connect to Slack networks. Sure, my text-based IRC client didn't show animated Giphy images or the 20 party-parrot gifs in a row, but to me, that was a feature. Unfortunately, Slack could no longer justify the engineering effort to backport web chat features to IRC and XMPP, so the company announced it was shutting down its IRC and XMPP gateways.

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Now Slack-ing Off Is Encouraged!

Shawn Powers — Tue, 02 May 2017 15:22:28 +0000

by Shawn Powers

If your company hasn't already chosen to utilize Slack, it's probably only a matter of time. For anyone who has been around IRC before, Slack might seem like a total ripoff. I'll be honest, when one of the companies I work for starting using it, I wasn't impressed, because I could do all the same things with IRC.

I was wrong—at least partially. Slack is certainly an IRC-like communication tool that is perfect for communicating with other people in an organization. What makes it special is its ability to integrate with other services so well. Things like Google-based authentication for single-sign-in is simple to configure. It also has a very robust API, so you can integrate countless third-party tools into your Slack environment. Some of them are silly (like adding GIPHY so you can insert animated GIF files into your conversations), and some are incredibly useful (like triggering remote scripts to give you real-time feedback in a chat window).

Plus, if you're like me and you can't do without IRC, it's possible to integrate IRC into your Slack experience using Sameroom. Truly it's the ability to integrate with other services that makes Slack so powerful, and its ease of use makes it popular for companies, even when the employees aren't all IT folks. Check it out today if you're looking for a great way to communicate with groups of people in your life that might not appreciate the nuances of IRC!

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Bounce Around IRC with ZNC

Shawn Powers — Wed, 12 Aug 2015 19:43:12 +0000

by Shawn Powers

In my discussion on IRC with "bkidwell" (see the Non-Linux FOSS article for more on our talk), we were discussing how we connect to IRC. My main method is to SSH in to my co-located Raspberry Pi in Austria and connect to a screen session I have running that is constantly connected to IRC with Irssi. This works really well for me, and I never miss messages when I'm away. The big problem I have is occasionally I'm away from a laptop, and so I can't efficiently use the terminal to chat. It might be technically possible to IRC chat via an SSH app on my phone, but it would mean super-tiny text and awkward keyboard shortcuts.

That's where ZNC comes into play. I've never used an IRC bouncer before, but the concept is that it stays connected to IRC using your credentials, and it allows you to connect to it with your IRC app and pick up where you left off. Functionally, it's like a screen session, but instead of connecting via SSH, you connect with an IRC client. Since it keeps you logged in, when you connect, you have access to the chats and personal queries that have occurred while you were disconnected. Plus, it allows you to connect from multiple locations at once and use whatever IRC client you want—there's no "client" application you have to use!

(Image from ttp://znc.in)

ZNC is really an awesome way to use IRC. It allows me to keep using Irssi too, because I just point Irssi at the ZNC bouncer, and never miss a beat even when I'm remote on my phone. If you use IRC regularly or are hesitant because of the issues I've highlighted here, I urge you to check out ZNC. It's at http://znc.in and is available for most platforms.

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Weechat, Irssi's Little Brother

Shawn Powers — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 15:58:31 +0000

by Shawn Powers

It may not be fair to call Weechat the little brother of Irssi, but in my short introduction to it, that's what it felt like. If Weechat didn't seem quite as powerful as Irssi to me, I definitely can say that it is better-looking out of the box. So, little brother has one thing going for him!

The other day, I was tweeting with Janne Jokitalo about the sorts of things two nerds tweet about: command-line editors and command-line chat clients. I mentioned Irssi in a screen, and he mentioned Weechat. I'm glad he did! Right out of the box, Weechat does some things I've never been able to get Irssi to do well. First off, it has a list of users docked to the right side of the terminal (Figure 1). I always liked that feature in the GUI client X-Chat, but I couldn't get it to work well in Irssi. I also think the look and feel is far more friendly than that of Irssi. Yes, with the help of Kyle Rankin, I've been able to tweak Irssi into the perfect chatting machine, but Weechat seems to have a more gentle learning curve.

Figure 1. The Linux Journal IRC bot works in Weechat, so I was happy.

It supports IRC and Jabber right now, but the Web site claims more protocols are coming. Weechat is probably already in your distro's repository, so install it, and give it a whirl. You'll get all the geek creed of Irssi with some fancy interface additions! Due to its focus on usability and its roots in hard-core nerd-dom on the command line, Weechat is this month's Editors' Choice selection. Check it out at http://www.weechat.org.

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IRC, Still the Best Support Around

Shawn Powers — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 13:00:00 +0000

by Shawn Powers

If you haven't gotten our subtle hints during the past year or so, IRC certainly is not dead. It really is the best way to get knowledgeable support from the folks who know best. There are a few caveats, however, that may not be obvious to people new to this old-school chat protocol.

Get a Good Client

If you just want to stop into the #linuxjournal channel for some quick banality, a Web-based client like the one at linuxjournal.com/irc is fine. You can drop in, request a !coffee from JustinBot, and chitchat with fellow geeks. If you're looking for something a bit more useful for the long haul, a native client makes more sense. Many people (myself included) like X-Chat. There are plenty of other options, like the command-line-only Irssi, but X-Chat offers a nice balance between features and usability.

If you look back at Kyle Rankin's Hack and / articles from the past year or so, you'll find easy ways to integrate your entire lifestyle into IRC. Kyle does everything from chatting to twittering inside his terminal window, and he shows us all how to do the same.

The opposite approach, which is actually what I do, is to add IRC as another instant-messaging protocol on my IM client. Although Kopete and Empathy may be slick-looking for instant messaging, none come close to Pidgin's elegance with IRC. Check out my video tech tip on how to set up IRC inside Pidgin if that makes more sense to the way you work during the day: linuxjournal.com/video/irc-chats-pidgin.

IRC Etiquette

Every channel you visit will have a different "personality" to it. The #linuxjournal channel on Freenode, for example, is really a goofy, easy-going channel full of geeks having fun. If you come visit us and say “Garble bargle, loopity loo”, no one will find you odd. In fact, you'll fit in quite nicely. On other channels, specifically channels where developers hang out related to a specific application, the atmosphere might be a bit more stuffy. My suggestion: hang out in a room for a while before you post questions. There may be links in the channel pointing to FAQs or information about how to conduct yourself without making anyone angry.

Be Patient

IRC is the sort of thing most geeks leave running but don't monitor constantly. If you pose a question, but don't get a response for a while, just wait. If you have a question for a specific person, typing his or her name in the channel often will alert the person (I have Pidgin set up to do that, and many folks do the same with their IRC clients). And finally, don't forget, it's a community. If you see a question you can answer, do it!

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