I think this may be overlooking the primary benefit of IRCCloud: This is a service that makes it someone else's problem.

I ran a bouncer for a while, but honestly, it's really nice being able to pay these guys a few bucks and have them deal with it. It has a matching Android app, and the transition between my various machines is very smooth.

But really, the main reason I use them is because I don't have to mess with running a bouncer or using a console-based IRC client. It's one less piece of mental clutter for me.

I've been wondering about this effect... is everyone else feeling it? I'm loathe to use anything other than a static site generator. Managing a database feels burdensome. I'd hardly think of running my own mailserver. All things I've done in the past without a second thought.

Do I just have less time? Are the services just better? Or is something more fundamental changing in the fabric of the web? (Maybe this is what the indieweb folks are trying to harken back to?)

Some call it laziness, but I like to think of it more as simplification. I used to run a handful of VMs for various things, did a lot more myself, and maintained it all.

I don't feel like doing that anymore. I'd rather spend the time on something else.

From my experience, it's all a matter of balance between the time needed to set up and maintain your system vs the burden to coerce someone else's system to behave† the way you want.

† behavior covers both technical (features, compatibility...) and ideological (privacy, openness...) areas.

Because anything that requires running a database is burdensome, and even those of us who roll our own services are becoming less patient with software that requires hand-holding just to walk.

This reminds me of reactions to the HN Dropbox announcement [1], "Just set up FTP, curlftpfs and SVN".

Same could be said for hosting a site, or hosting your code, or using EC2 instances, or buying precooked meals, and so on.

Sometimes people would rather have others deal with it and use their own time on other things.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

I knew I was going to draw comments like yours. I didn't say that this service cannot be valuable to people, I just pointed out that you can get really close with simple means. If you're happy with the package that irccloud provides, then by all means go for it. I say this as a person who use many online services, both free and commercial.

The dropbox comparison is a bad one because it takes way more effort to set it up -- without spending a ton of effort you won't get anywhere near what dropbox offers.

You know, this is suggested all the time. But neither is perfect.

I personal use a terminal client, but sometimes I'd like to have a client that I can use a mouse on, or is more responsive over bad connections, which can be painful.

And then bouncers have tons of problems. They really require understanding what's going on, and you have all types of channel connection problems. And in particular, they are difficult to handle messages that came in offline, or on other machines. And just are much more complicated then they should be.

And both have other problems, like difficulty reconnecting and the like.

I'm not sure irccloud will solve these problems. But there are for sure many problems that neither an ssh connection or a bouncer solve.

The irssi-proxy plugin lets you connect to your current irssi connections via any existing irc client.

Yeah but it doesn't have scrollback support so you can't see any messages you received while you were offline, so it's not really so useful.

Or has it recently got such support ?

I've been using irccloud for about 3 years, after 15 years in ircii, irssi and weechat inside screen and tmux. Aside from irccloud's mobile clients with push notifications, the biggest improvement over a terminal client has been multi line URL access. With weechat, I'd spend several minutes reconstructing a long URL in my browser, because my terminal wouldn't know what to do with weechat's sidebar. now I just click a URL and it opens. Stupid, but worth $5 a month to me.

I'm involved in a weechat web frontend which solves some of the problems.

If anyone's curious, here it is: http://torhve.github.io/glowing-bear/

What you say is right: > you can get most (or all) of these features by running a terminal irc client like irssi or weechat in screen/tmux. But if you're an IRC newbie that is accessing some support channel on Freenode via web and discover that there are more channels related to the stuff you like (Ruby/Go/Erlang/pr0n/etc) and then you hear about IRCCloud then you think you're on the right path :) Not that I've been there. I'm just trying to put myself in somebody's shoes. Back in the days I tried ZNC and then switched to just screen (now tmux) + irssi. <3 So, yeah, don't be so tough with the guys that haven't yet heard of IRC and don't know what's going on lol.

For the record, I use weechat (termianl-based) on top of ZNC. ZNC is just a lot nicer in general than the screen/tmux based solution. Plus, SSHing on mobile is a pain in the ass - I'd rather use a native client.

I can do it from the browser that is the nice thing about it.

imagine a bouncer that correctly keeps all your clients in sync. e.g. read vs unread.

In addition to this they have a fantastic iOS client.

Though you'd have to be 24/7 online to get notifications and logs, thus, needing a server.

I currently use an irssi plugin to send notifications to my glass when I'm offline :)

Could any sentence combine old-school and new-school geekiness quite so well? I love it.

Someone needs to hack together a gopher client for glass.