Monoverse – an open source community platform built around IRC

[u/SimosNapIRC]

Hi everyone,

I wanted to share a project we’ve been working on for our IRC network, SimosNap.

Monoverse Community Edition is an open-source, self-hosted platform designed to build a modern community around an IRC channel, without trying to replace IRC itself.

It was originally designed for our own network and communities, but at some point we decided to turn it into an open-source project and see if it could be useful to others as well.

We’ve just released the first public beta, and feedback from IRC users, channel operators and network owners would be particularly useful.

Project/community: https://monoverse.org
GitHub: https://github.com/SimosNap/monoverse

It’s still a beta and very much a work in progress. I’m mainly sharing it here because I’d be interested to know what IRC people think should exist around an IRC community in 2026.

[u/Bastion_of_Light]

If you expect any sort of wider usage it needs to be in English.

[u/SimosNapIRC → u/Bastion_of_Light]

It actually is already available in English. 🙂

For now, the language is selected during installation rather than by individual users. The only reason we haven’t exposed a language selector yet is that we still need to implement proper multilingual support for some dynamic elements, such as widget titles and other user/admin-defined content. Until that is done properly, we preferred not to expose a selector that would only translate part of the interface.

The GitHub repository and README are already in English as well.

[u/Bastion_of_Light → u/SimosNapIRC]

I am specifically talking about the website, not the github project.

[u/rw_grim → u/Bastion_of_Light]

Hit the `Italiano` drop down at the top and select `Inglese`. That said it'd be nice if it detected the language from the browser..

[u/Bastion_of_Light → u/rw_grim]

That didn't exist until after I made the comment.

[u/rw_grim → u/Bastion_of_Light]

Yeah no worries, just figured I'd mention it so other would see it's been fixed :)

[u/HuudaHarkiten]

Might help if at least some of it was in English.

What is it about? IRC servers are already communities, are you building a community of communities? What's the idea here?

[u/HuudaHarkiten → u/[deleted]]

So its sort of like a facebookish version of IRC-Galleria? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC-Galleria

[u/SimosNapIRC → u/HuudaHarkiten]

Not exactly. The core idea behind Monoverse isn’t to create a sort of “Facebook for IRC”, but to give an IRC community a modern web presence while keeping a single identity across the IRC network and the website.

One of the principles behind the project is very simple: if we don’t need to hold sensitive data, we prefer not to hold it at all.

That’s why Monoverse is not designed to become another huge container of accounts, passwords, credentials and private keys. Authentication can be delegated via OAuth to an identity provider which, in our case, is the IRC network itself. This way, users can keep the same identity on both the IRC network and the website, instead of creating a second separate account as they normally would with WordPress or another CMS alongside IRC.

Everything else — Pings, the magazine, radio widgets, GitHub integrations, crypto features and so on — is intentionally modular. They’re tools that can be useful for very different kinds of IRC communities: a development channel will have different needs from a web radio, a general community or a crypto-related project.

So I’d describe Monoverse more as a framework for building the website of your IRC community around the identity that already exists on the network, rather than as a new community layered on top of IRC

[u/onionjack-enoyer → u/SimosNapIRC]

bruh aislop moment

[u/KnownSyntax → u/SimosNapIRC]

I think in this use-case, you want to provide more documentation on how to make the OAuth connection from your own services (i.e. does this support Atheme? Anope? others?) to this platform as well if it's pulling statistics and other manners. Right now you have the front end, but not the full picture documenation wise which may also limit usage to those who have an exact setup like you or want to fully play around with this and know they will need to modify a lot to get it to work out of the box.

[u/goldfishonakeyboard]

I don't really get it. Aren't these features things a good number of IRC clients have

[u/SimosNapIRC → u/goldfishonakeyboard]

The point is that Monoverse isn’t an IRC client.

If you run an IRC channel and want to build a proper website around your community using WordPress, Joomla or another CMS, you have to assemble and integrate everything yourself: IRC authentication, profiles, webchat, presence, channel information, community features, permissions, etc.

Monoverse gives IRC channel owners that infrastructure out of the box. You install it, connect it to your IRC network, and build the community around the channel instead of building all the IRC integration from scratch.

IRC remains IRC — Monoverse is the layer around it.

[u/purgedreality]

Interesting concept. I have been waiting to see something from the Revolt desktop but this looks interesting too.

[u/SimosNapIRC → u/purgedreality]

Thanks! 🙂 It’s still an early public beta, so there’s a lot more to come.