Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am pretty sure nobody except nerds knows what IRC is right now. It's long since been supplanted by user-friendlier group chat services. There's a lot of talk around #mastoadmin lately about people wanting some way to make one instance follow another instance's blocks, with varying amounts of human decision-making in the loop. There's multiple people already sharing their blocklists to help new admins catch up with…
I am pretty sure nobody except nerds knows what IRC is right now. It's long since been supplanted by user-friendlier group chat services. I agree with this. Like I mentioned this is slowly changing with web front-ends to IRC like TheLounge. NGIRCD [1] + TheLounge [2] take all of about 10 minutes to set up and then maybe another 10 minutes to tie that into and configure IRC services such as Anope [3]. I would not be s…
Hosting a platform reliably isn't something that one can do with the BBS of old. Having the data center; or paying for AWS and the corresponding maintenance and security for the site; and that in today's polarized world, hosting such a paints a target on you and your services for threats and DDOS attacks whoever someone has a disagreement with you.
While yes, one nerd can host the platform, if it scales to thousands or tens of thousands it is not fun and tends to be much more than a hobby to do so.