Frequently asked questions

At its core, IRC Today is an IRC bouncer as a service. We enable you to connect to any IRC network from any device, while keeping and sharing your message history across devices, and sending mobile notifications when you are mentioned.

We also provide multiple features related to IRC:

• An intuitive, one-click web chat
• Upload and share files on your channels (with files stored on our servers)
• Search all your message history across networks in our web interface

IRC is an instant messaging protocol. On every messaging platform, someone has to store your account, message history, and file uploads, stay connected for you so that you get notifications while away, etc. All main proprietary messaging platforms (WhatsApp, Discord, ...) process and store your account data along with running the platform infrastructure. This costs them money, and they afford it by either making you (or enterprise users) pay for the service, running ads, or getting paid by investors to increase their user base aggressively.

IRC works differently by design; companies or associations host the server infrastructure only; but they do not keep the history of your messages, nor keep you connected at all times so that you can get notifications. This is not a technical limitation, but an intentional design: the hosts handle only the infrastructure, and the user (or a third-party) is responsible for the additional work and costs of staying connected and hosting long-term message data.

Without an IRC bouncer, when you close your IRC browser or IRC app, you stop receiving any message history: it is lost forever. You do not get notified of new messages while you are not there. Each app or browser also stores messages on its own, and your messages are not intuitively shared across your devices.

That is why an IRC bouncer is almost required when using IRC. Some expert users have a personal server in the cloud running at all times to keep an IRC bouncer running (coming with additional costs); but most users will want to use an IRC bouncer as a service, provided by a third party.

Proprietary messaging platforms handle everything related to the service in a centralized place, as opposed to IRC; where each group chat channel can be located on a different IRC server infrastructure, and each user can store his account data on a distinct server.

This means that traditional, proprietary messaging platforms can have global service outages; can take one-sided business decisions which users are effectively forced to accept due to the monopolistic nature of such platforms; and can use all the data of all their users as a means to grow their business.

If proprietary messaging platforms were perfect, granting them all these responsibilities and tasks would enable them to make "the one unique, best messaging platform". In practice, this model brings a lot of ethical and technical issues; that can be worth the tradeoff in some environments (many companies will just pay for a proprietary platform for their internal chat); but for associations, informal discussion, and even companies, it makes more sense to split all this processing and data across several IRC network providers, and their own IRC bouncers.

In particular, switching from one proprietary messaging platform to another is difficult, because all messages and friends are stored in it, and are not easily exported or moved to another platform. This gives these platforms a lot of inertia, even when they start taking decisions that are detrimental to their users. On the other hand, it is very easy to change IRC networks, and this has been done regularly in the past. In 2021, after a controversial takeover and direction change in the decade-old historic network freenode, most projects using the network moved to the new network Libera.Chat in mere weeks/months.

IRC Today is run by a long-time maintainer of pieces of the IRC ecosystem: bouncer, clients, and bot libraries. We have co-developed the open source piece of software used in our service, soju.

We are based in the EU, with servers located in France, known for its strict privacy laws.

The IRC Today servers and user data are hosted in France at Scaleway, a non-Big-Tech mid-tier cloud provider, which strikes the balance between high availability and decentralization.

The Demo tier is permanently free; it is not a limited-time trial. The Demo tier enables you to try out the service; both for discovering the features of the product; and for ensuring that you do not encounter any technical issues if using a particular IRC software stack.

In addition to testing out IRC Today, you can also chat with limited history on an internal network; which enables you, for instance, to chat with your friends or family without having them to pay for an account.