Wed, 07 Jan 2026 21:45:00 +0100
IRC

last week i discovered thelounge [1] "The self-hosted web IRC client". which made me fall back in love with irc again. the setup on my 1€/month vps took like 5 minutes, the https certificate another 10. in the past i used znc [2], and it was such a hustle setting it up and joining new networks. but thelounge feels just like discord, just without the corporate surveillance and bloat. 

since irc is so text-only and in the spirit of web 1.0, i had to make sure to create a channel on libera.chat called #textonly (which is a channel for my textonly.website project [3]). if you already use irc you know how to get there but if you are new to it you can stop by through gamja [4] in your web browser and say hi.

i have swiftly written a few irc bots in no time, one of them takes the website submissions for textonly.website and sends them to me on irc, another one runs a local llm (gemma3:4b) on my raspberry pi which i (and you) can chat to called hoxha (also available on ##llm-bots). 

[1] https://thelounge.chat/
[2] https://wiki.znc.in/ZNC
[3] https://textonly.website/
[4] https://web.libera.chat/gamja/#textonly