I’ve noticed some blog posts mentioning IRC communities. I personally haven’t used IRC in ages and I’m curious about who is still using it and why. Examples welcome.
I miss IRC.
You had to be at least a little smart to connect, and the not-smart or uninformed could be easily identified as connecting from a webirc gateway.
Of course maybe what I miss was just the old Web 1.0- no ‘platforms’, peoples web pages were unique and individual not generic, there was no ‘like comment and subscribe!!’ crap. No algorithms. Discussion was overall more intelligent.And for those people using IRC: which network(s) do you use? I have fuzzy memories of EFnet and DALnet being big, but I’ve been away from IRC for a long time.
Edit: Holy shit, I just logged into a DALnet channel I frequented in the late 90’s and a bunch of the same users are still there! It’s like a time capsule!
Try Libera Chat if you like the free/libre software community. About 30’000 users connected right now.
That’s always been my barrier of entry
Freenode is owned by Chinese bitcoin millionaires, and rizon is owned by the IDF. Careful where you go.
Daily by abstraction.
Twitch chat and discord text channels are pretty much IRC in disguise.
IRC is an open source protocol, there are dozens of clients and entire networks of bots built on top of it.
Twitch and Discord are walled gardens that are but a shadow of what IRC is.
It’s the predecessor of discord etc. So if you are old enough and nerdy enough… I am only old enough ;-)
(In even earlier times, there was “finger” for personal status messages - googel it if you don’t know it)
“finger”
They stole this from Unix. Finger was a common binary, installed world-wide.
https://xkcd.com/1782 for some
I know Alpine Linux uses IRC for development. https://alpinelinux.org/community/
I go there from time to time when I have an issue I can’t figure out myself.
It’s mature and simple which is why I believe it’s used more often by developers.
I keep a client running out of habit. All my regular hangs are pretty dead. People left their clients running out of habit. One line per month is a busy month.
A small group of friends have moved to a self-hosted matrix server. That’s more active.
I think there’s just a paradigm change. IRC used to be pretty synchronous. You’d chat while you were connected, and not really multitask and zone out to do other stuff.
Today people expect messaging to be asynchronous. You get your push notifications and deal with it when you have the time.
XDCC > Torrent. Just sayin’.
Shhh, not too loud or someone might do something against it.
Yeah, too bad SubsPlease just announced they would shut down their XDCC Bots. Was the best way to get anime
I use it occasionally. The problem is, most of my communities are on Discord. Plus, rooms not being permanent on the server means that bots have to be hosted by someone, plus there’s a severe lack of effective logging.
Basically, all the problems that later chat programs solve, I keep missing on IRC. I want persistent rooms. I want federation & bridging between servers. I need trustworthy remote logs. Since I know a lot of that has been handled client-side, I don’t understand why it can’t be implemented server-side with IRCv4 or whatever is next.
Seems like what you want is matrix
Matrix but with stronger community engagement, yes.
Too bad about the insane schema.
Sorry, what do you mean by schema?
The database schema that sets each room as the atomic unit. That ends up creating a very convoluted database structure prone to corruption.
I’ve been IRC for nearly 30 years and I still host my own server for the few friends that are also still going there. We were traditionally all going on Undernet but there’s been massive attacks about 15 years ago and we migrated on our own network.
I also host a web client called The Lounge so that we can view and paste images/mp4s/mp3s directly on channels, with previews, push notifications, and logging.
We made the switch from plain text to web clients a few years ago and it really helped to modernize the experience and keep IRC relevant for us. If it was still only text I may have moved to another protocol. At one point I tried installing a Matrix server to replace IRC but found it too complex for simple chat and just stuck with web clients, like The Lounge or Convos.
it’s extremely good and it has every feature that it needs.
it comes from the era of the internet that developed communication protocols instead of proprietary for-profit software applications running on an electron gui or whatever.
Every popular chat client since IRC has been IRC plus whatever feature was seen as needed.
I’m old enough that I met my wife on IRC. A younger coworker of mine once said of modern chat “you can only reskin Slack so many ways.” He was right but got one word wrong.
I’ve used it occasionally to chat with fellow NetHack players.
NetHack. Tracker support. Very occasionally, ebooks and audiobooks I couldn’t find elsewhere.
I still do, though it’s a recent development. There’s one community that stopped using Discord for reasons that moved to IRC
If you’re running the latest Debian (or even the stable one), IRC is still a good place to go for support. And there is an electronics channel on Libera that was still big last time I checked. If you don’t know which IC to use for your project someone there will probably know. I would stick around there if I were still into electronics.
Also, IRC is just more relaxing by being text-only. No flashy avatars, pictures, reactions, and for most parts no gamification.
