Before people could ask a chatbot their programming questions, they asked living breathing humans. If you’re stuck setting up Linux or want to talk to someone about a new programming language you’re learning, chat applications still exist.
Discord is the obvious choice for a lot of projects and offers plenty of features. However owing to the low barrier to entry Discords can be rather crowded and hard to get a word in on. Instead, I recommend those with a retro sensibility to try out IRC.
IRC is not only still around but still large enough for network drama. It’s especially popular for FOSS projects. The problem is presence: you will only get IRC messages while you’re connected. This is great for always-on desktops but not great for the sort of asynchronous communication style that my Slack-addled brain needs.
So first you’ll need an always-on machine. I’m using a raspberry pi I keep around the house for coding but you could use a cloud server too.
You can connect to it with JuiceSSH Use tmux to avoid getting disconnected when you disconnect.
Use IRSSI. Connect to the server with /connect and then connect to the channel with /join (most start with ##)
Finally, to cut down the noise, use this command to hide noise messages:
/ignore -channels #channel * JOINS PARTS QUITS NICKS
(from https://blog.htbaa.com/news/irssi-ignore-joins-parts-quits-and-nicks-messages)
