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Ever since I discovered IRC, I've known that I want a bouncer as part of my setup. Not only because I've a rather unreliable internet connection (yes, I know it's 2021) but also because I enjoy browsing through conversations that happened when I was AFK.
My first foray into the world of bouncers lead me to the (aptly?) intimidating ZNC and attempting to set it up on my VPS proved to be a rather overwhelming experience. I never did figure out what I was doing wrong and for reasons that'll become apparent later in this piece, I never will know for I don't mean to revisit ZNC ever again. Fate brazenly tempted.
My next attempt was a lot more succesful as I used a WeeChat relay on my VPS that I could connect to using Weechat-Android on my phone. Rather embarassingly, WeeChat itself cannot connect to a WeeChat relay and so I had to setup IRC proxies that I could connect to from my laptop. I detailed this process here not too long ago.
Connecting to a WeeChat IRC proxy using WeeChat
I was quite happy with this setup except for one particular aspect of it. The IRC proxies meant that I couldn't really access conversations that took place when I was away from my laptop. While my mobile experience was all I wanted it to be, on the laptop my setup was merely letting me hold on to my nick.
I'd known about The Lounge for a while but thought it too complex a project for my skill level. Having fiddled around with quite a few things in the last couple of months though I was beginning to feel the stirrings of confidece and decided to give it a shot.
The Lounge makes for an amazing web experience and as a progressive web app, it also made for a pretty solid mobile experience but in the end, it was a web experience. I hated leaving my terminal behind and so it was that irc.low-key.me was sunset just a week after its inception.
During my earliest exploration of the world of bouncers, I came across a recommendation for pounce.
Back then, I found it a bit too esoteric and the lack of guides online for setting it up made me pass it up in favor of WeeChat. However, I'd come across its sister program, catgirl, recently.
Catgirl is a minimalistic IRC client that I fell in love with the moment I saw it in a screenshot of a fellow geminaut on IRC <shout out to neko>. When I began, I struggled a bit with setting it up as I was attempting to connect to WeeChat IRC proxies that ignore IRC standards and also to my own network that only had a self-signed certificate. Thanfully, June, the creator herself was around to help me out with all my silly oversights and I had catgirl setup on my system in no time. This is something I love about these artisanal projects. That you can interact with these creators so directly. It's a humbling and exhilirating experience to be helped out by them.
I find everything about catgirl beautiful. Its default layout, the way you launch it by just pointing to config file per network and its delightful name. I could've stopped here but having set it up, I was now feeling up to the task of setting up pounce. I got it onto my server, read through the excellent man page a couple of times and was left in awe at the fact that setting it up was just a one-liner. With that done, I changed my WeeChat relay to point to the two pounce instances connected to the networks I frequent. As a result, my mobile setup remained unchanged and as solid as ever.
I couldn't be happier than I am with my IRC setup and I owe it all to June :)
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CC0 low-key, 2021-01-19