Sourcehut recently announced their new chat.sr.ht service to provide an IRC bouncer server for all paying members. You can read more about the launch on sourcehut’s blog. I’ve been running my own ZNC bouncer, but it broke and I haven’t got around to fixing it. As a result, I haven’t been using as much IRC. I’ve been looking to the release of chat.sr.ht as a way to get back into it. I use Emacs as my IRC client, and it took me one night of fiddling to get it working with the new Soju bouncer. The chat.sr.ht service requires login via SASL. The built-in ERC client in Emacs does not support SASL logins. I decided to use Circe instead. Below is a configuration that has been working well.
(use-package! circe
:config
(setq circe-network-options
`(("Libera"
:tls t
:nick "nackjicholson"
:host "chat.sr.ht"
:port 6697
;; For security purposes pulling these from an encrypted secrets file
:sasl-username "willvaughn/libera@my-client"
:sasl-password "...sr.ht oauth token..."))
circe-reduce-lurker-spam t))
(use-package! circe-color-nicks
:config
(enable-circe-color-nicks))
This service pushed me over the edge toward really trying sourcehut, and it’s great. I’m going to bring my projects onto the platform. This blog is now using https://srht.site/ for static web hosting. It was a painless migration. I’m planning to move many of my personal repos over to sourcehut. I will likely keep popular projects like aiosql where they are in order to not be too disruptive to the community already using them. One of the things that really attracts me to sourcehut is their business philosophy and uncompromising pursuit of being a truly open source first platform.
I also love their willingness to dispense with the status quo and push their users to change their habits and adapt to simpler and established tooling that works better for everyone.
I hope I’ll see your projects on sourcehut. Please come contribute on mine!