Is it okay to use a free IRC channel as a realtime server of sorts for my small app?

Question

I'm currently working on an app that will need some realtime communication between two clients. Not necessarily text chat. I was wondering if I can utilize free IRC services like Freenode to act as the backend of sorts for my app's communication?

I skimmed through their TOS and I couldn't find anything against it. But I want to know if there are some gotchas that I need to be aware of.

Answer 1

It sounds like what you're really asking is something like the following...

How can I communicate between two clients over the Internet, even if both of these clients are behind some kind of firewall that prevents a direct TCP or UDP connection?

Answer: The usual solution is to use a server on the Internet that is reachable by both clients as an intermediary, to relay their traffic. Up until recently this was accomplished in a very application specific manner and required managing a dedicated server on the Internet. But what if there was a way to offload the burden to someone else...

I was wondering if I can utilize free IRC services like Freenode to act as the backend of sorts for my app's communication?

Answer: Probably not. Or if it works for your test app, you will quickly get banned in production when you try to send a significant amount of traffic through the IRC servers. Fortunately this kind of relay service is actually available for developers and production use cases. The WebRTC was designed specifically to make these kinds of real-time applications possible. The firewall-busting buzzwords you should be Googling for are STUN and TURN.

I'm currently looking into Twilio's hosted service for my own apps, however it's also possible to host your own TURN relay on Amazon's EC2. Unfortunately there's no such thing as a free lunch, so you'll have to pay some amount for each of these services but you'll be able to bask in the warm glow of writing robust, standards compliant code.