The emergence of social media has destroyed all the small communities to standardize communication and information.
It’s a bit of a digital version of rural exodus. And since 2017/2018, I’ve noticed that everything that, in my opinion, represented the internet has disappeared.
I’ve known Lemmy for a few hours and I feel like I’m back in the early spirit of the internet.
Well no they are not. Netsplit follows IRC and tracks users and IRC servers. You can watch the decline over time. Quakenet alone had nearly 200,000 monthly active user alone back in 2005.
The split of freenode, the technical abilities of people, and the lack of a easy to use mobile client all made people turn away from IRC. Factor in discord and Reddit and you lose even more.
The number of servers from 2005 to today has dropped also. From 3500 to about a thousand.
I love IRC, but it has been on a decline for a long time. Particularly if you factor in the number of online users today versus back then in general. The percentage of them that uses IRC or even knows what it is, is much smaller.
I suppose you could argue that unpublished networks, onion sites, and other IRC outside of mainstream exist, but how many users do they have?
I agree about percentage, my argument was about abosulte number of active users.
That too, the number of users is way down.
On the channels I frequent, activity seems stable, and I haven’t seen numbers saying otherwise. Active users =/= connections.
There are sites that track this information or you can use the way back machine. IRC is a quarter or less of what it used to be in say 2005-2010.
That is real data.
Hard to argue if the source is “there are sites”…