Well. There are a few places around. The big ones are places like libera.chat, oftc.net, etc. Those are HUGE though (By irc standards) so sometimes it can get overwhelming trying to find somewhere to just hang out and chat. Slightly smaller servers tend to work better as an introduction, at least to me. Things like tilde.chat which has a clearly defined main chat area, and a lot of more niche chats for things you might be interested in.

Generally, if you get started on one server, and make some friends, join a few channels, find some interests, you’ll find your servers expanding. It’s a large enough ecosystem to have a LOT of people, but small enough that you’ll bump in to people you already know if you try multiple servers. Which is nice.

Come on in! It’s still just as wild and wonderful as it ever was!

cos irc just works. It worked just fine 20 years ago. It worked 20 ish years before that. In 20 more years it’ll still work.

Any idiot with some time and a computer can throw up an ircd and host a server for people to chat on. Every other chat program either requires some random company to host it, or a much deeper knowledge of computers and software.

The clients are available for every system around. From tiny little simple single connection clients, to massive complex graphical systems. You want to chat on plan9? There’s a client. An ancient amstrad cpc? There’s a client. (That one might be a bit more challenging) Android, Linux, Windows, Mac? All of them have clients, most of them multiple.

I will say, I like Matrix, I like XMPP, I am not a huge fan of any of the chat clients with a single point of failure like discord or teams or whatever. But IRC is still my favorite, and probably will be forever.

I just have it setup the way I want.

I haven’t really shopped around in a while, I just use the gandi forwarding rather than hosting mail, so the changes haven’t hit me yet. I hear porkbun.com is pretty good. They don’t offer free email but they do have cheap email hosting and apparently the cheapest prices for registering a domain.

I did it a long time ago, I found it easiest to do it by dual booting. Install a more common distro, but setup the disks yourself so you have a chunk of space available at the end of the disk, then install LFS on to the space you left from inside your regular distro. It means you can just leave it at any break point without having to figure out where you were. You have a working distro to play on whilst things compile as well, which is nice. Then you can just add the LFS install to grub and boot into it whenever you want once it’s at that point.