Cygnet Relay is my modern IRC deployment — eggbotted and anoped, sick. For the uninitiated: a clean ircd, services running on Anope, and an Eggdrop bot holding the channels so the network survives a netsplit without everyone losing ops.

The whole stack is containers behind a single TLS terminator. IRC gets a bad rap for being plaintext; there's no excuse for that anymore. Every link — client to server, server to server, bot to server — speaks TLS or it doesn't speak at all.

connect {
  host = "hub.tuttle.town";
  port = 6697;
  ssl  = yes;
};

Why IRC in 2026? Because it's a protocol I fully understand, it runs on a potato, and no company can sunset it out from under me. Cygnet Relay is small on purpose. That's the feature.