I’ve been rebuilding my IRC bouncer setup and as part of this process I’ve
decided to connect to IRC via onion services where possible. This setup isn’t
intended to provide anonymity as once I’m connected I’m going to identify to
NickServ anyway. I guess it provides a little protection in that my IP
address shouldn’t be visible in that gap between connection and a cloak
activating, but there’s so many other ways that my identity could leak.
I use IRC every day. I use it to speak to people at my local hackerspace and to fellow Debian or Tor Project developers. My set up is a little complex but every part serves a purpose.
Connection diagram for my IRC setup
The service that actually performs the connections to IRC servers is ZNC, an IRC bouncer. The main features this provides are aggressively remaining connected to ensure that I’m not missing anything and also to authenticate to NickServ automatically in the case of a disconnect. Other features from ZNC I use are the keepnick plugin (to keep trying for my primary nick) and the chansaver plugin to keep track of which channels I’m in.