How to use IRC for Facebook chat & more?

If you're like me, you appreciate the fact that there are no push-notification and social media messages while using System 7. It puts you back in control of things.

However, every once in a while it is nice to chat with friends or family. While System 7 isn't able to fight the JavaScript battles on facebook.com, it certainly is ready for Instant Messenging. How so, you ask?

All you need is an IRC client and an account with the service of your choice. The official Macintosh Garden IM Gateway will bring both worlds together. Currently supported are: Facebook Chat, Discord, Jabber, Twitter, Telegram, GaduGadu, ICQ, Skype and many more.

Start the IRC client of your choice. I'm using MacIRC in this example but every other IRC client should work too.

Macirc connecting to the Macintosh Garden IM server

Where your client asks for connection details, enter chat.macintoshgarden.org as the server name.

Pick a user / nickname too. You can leave password or realname alone for now. Connect!

You'll be greeted by the &bitlbee server. That's the server that will handle the communication with e.g. facebook for you.

Now type register {password} to sign up, where password is the one you'd like to use.

On later returns, use identify {password} to log back in

Now find the service you'd like to use. Type plugins list to see all avaliable plugins to choose from. We'll choose Facebook Chat for this tutorial.

To add your Facebook Chat account, type account add facebook {email} {password} (where email is the email you registered with Facebook and the password for your Facebook account)

We need to adjust a setting for Facebook Chat (or any other plugin you choose) to use "pretty" names in the userlist instead of just ID's. Type account facebook set nick_format %full_name

To connect to Facebook, simply type account facebook on

It should connect to the server now. In case you typed your password wrong and want to unregister, you can also delete the account by using account facebook del and start over again.

Wanna send someone from your contact list a message? Type /msg {username} {messagetext}. Example: /msg JohnDoe Hi, how is it going?

Note: Your chat about last week's Football game is not encrypted. If that makes you uncomfortable, please do not use this service. This service is provided by System 7 Today's co-admin Knezzen. He's the only one with access to it, and unlike the NSA, he does not read any of your messages. Give it a spin.

Happy Instant Messaging on your System 7 hardware!

P.S. For those of you who'd like to use Discord, Steven from Mac84.net made a tutorial. Watch it as a Quicktime movie on Cornica.org.

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