Lurker keeps you present in every IRC channel you care about, holding your connections open around the clock and recording everything said so a retro, searchable web client can hand it all back whenever you return. Invite your friends and each person gets their own set of networks under one roof, while admins decide which networks members may join and which channels newcomers are pointed at. Nothing said while you were away is lost: the full history is searchable by nick, channel or network, and clicking a result jumps straight to that moment, whether it happened an hour or a year ago. The everyday annoyances are handled too, with drafts that follow you between devices, a highlight and ignore system that cuts noise, bookmarks and private notes on users, reactions, replies, and image uploads that are optimized, stripped of metadata and stored on your own disk or S3. If you prefer your old client, the built-in bouncer speaks the soju and ZNC dialects with SASL, network discovery, on-demand scrollback and read markers that stay in sync everywhere, and DCC file transfers with an XDCC queue still work. Optional companion containers generate inline link previews in isolation and keep your IRC connections alive across restarts of the main service. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MPL-2.0 licensed.

"Forget about bouncers" became a real sentence because of The Lounge: a Node.js web IRC client that holds persistent connections to your networks 24/7, logging everything while you sleep, so closing the browser tab never means missing a message or losing your place in a channel. Open it again from any device - desktop, phone, tablet - and you resume exactly where you left off, with full history synchronized. Because it combines bouncer and client in one process, the experience feels like a modern chat app rather than 1990s infrastructure: push notifications for highlights and private messages (with self-generated VAPID keys, so even Web Push needs no third-party service), automatic link previews, inline file and image uploads, and full IRCv3 protocol support. It installs as a progressive web app from any modern browser, so phones get a native-feel client without an app store. Multi-user support means one instance serves your whole team or community, each user with their own networks and history, and LDAP integration ties into existing authentication. A public mode alternatively serves as an open, registration-free web chat for events or support channels. MIT-licensed, born as a fork of Shout, and a fixture of self-hosting stacks since.

With over 7,500 GitHub stars and 140 contributors, Matterbridge is the Go-powered chat bridge that connects over 20 messaging platforms through a single TOML configuration file, letting teams communicate across platform boundaries without forcing anyone to switch applications. The gateway architecture routes messages bidirectionally between any combination of Discord, Slack, Telegram, Matrix, IRC, Mattermost, Microsoft Teams, XMPP, Rocket.Chat, Nextcloud Talk, Keybase, Mumble, Twitch, WhatsApp, VK, Gitter, Zulip, ssh-chat, and Harmony, with transparent username and avatar spoofing so bridged messages appear native on each platform. Message edits and deletes propagate across bridges, file attachments and inline images transfer between protocols, threading and reply context is preserved where platforms support it, and private group bridging enables confidential cross-platform conversations. Multiple independent gateways can run simultaneously, each bridging different channel sets with different protocol combinations. The REST API enables third-party integrations and custom bridges without modifying the Matterbridge codebase, while the tengo scripting engine allows inline message transformation and filtering. Game chat support bridges Minecraft and Counter-Strike server chat into messaging platforms. Deployment runs as a single static Go binary with zero dependencies, or as the official Docker image with the configuration file mounted as a volume. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. Apache-2.0 licensed.