Funny, I think the exact opposite. All social spaces are about the people/community, which mostly adapts itself around whatever space they happen to be around, be it a park, shopping map, IRC, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

What's special about IRC is that it's really easy to set up. If all of the social platforms collapsed, you could set up and use IRC with your group of friends until the next social platform blows up and "everyone" moves to it.

If a partial/regional apocalypse happened, you could set up and run IRC.

I love irc, but irc is probably more problematic to manage for users and admins/moderators than discord.

I don't like the discord server model, but it allows the platform to prevent spam more easily and to put the responsibility on server owners.

Searching chat history is also a big plus.

IRC sets a high bar for users to choose a client, create an auth account etc. So obviously many of them are power users, and those users are qualitative.

Discord is just much easier for everybody, and it makes money.

IRC is also very low bandwidth so you can't throttle it. IRC will live forever and is one of the longest lasting technologies of the internet.

I think your statements about average age and number of users is probably correct.

I would say this is another indication of how people who grew up with the internet, and who generally base their "community" and "friends" in corporate digital products, are incapable of pushing back on corporate overreach.

Are you finding it difficult as a young professional to buy a house, keep up with subscriptions, save for retirement? Don't worry, you'll be screwed 10x worse by the time your of retirement age.

The "i've got nothing to hide from constant survielance", "just use chrome" crowd is digging their own financial grave.

Think it's bad now, just wait...

This makes me wonder if there will ever be a day in the distance future where the final Bitcoin node will be turned off forever vanquishing the cryptocurrency to the digital graveyard.

I'm pretty sure you can share links to memes or videos on IRC

I think things like discord leave users like me behind. I have 3rd world level internet and computing resources to the extent that I can't use things like discord because I can't afford memory and bandwidth. It does cause me discomfort to see posts like yours, I mean yeah good internet should be available to all but all I have is very limitted phone access. IRC can run on potatos so its like it makes me feel still connected a bit.

The Freenode implosion also nuked chanserv and nickserv on Freenode side as well, so things happened there as well.

> "why not just update IRC to be like Discord?"

Because one is a protocol and another is a platform. To quote from [0]:

    After 30+ years, email is still unencrypted; meanwhile WhatsApp went from unencrypted to full e2ee in a year. People are still trying to standardize sharing a video reliably over IRC; meanwhile, Slack lets you create custom reaction emoji based on your face.

    This isn’t a funding issue. If something is truly decentralized, it becomes very difficult to change, and often remains stuck in time. That is a problem for technology, because the rest of the ecosystem is moving very quickly, and if you don’t keep up you will fail. There are entire parallel industries focused on defining and improving methodologies like Agile to try to figure out how to organize enormous groups of people so that they can *move as quickly as possible* because it is so critical.

    When the technology itself is more conducive to stasis than movement, that’s a problem. A sure recipe for success has been to take a 90’s protocol that was stuck in time, centralize it, and iterate quickly.

[0] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

I thought Matrix was hot garbage last time I tried it.

Modern software tries to do too much and as a result often fails to perform its main function.

IRC is pretty much the simplest solution that works. It wont be going anywhere.

To my knowledge, the core of Twitch chat is just IRC[0]. They've obviously extended it a fair bit, but it's probably the largest service I can think of that leans on the protocol.

[0] https://dev.twitch.tv/docs/chat/

I visit a /g/ adjacent channel regularly on Rizon. I've also interacted with two software projects on Libera in the last 6 months. So yes, it is still active.

I use some IRC channels on Libera IRC, and there are some people writing to most of them often enough; I also write on IRC sometimes.

IRC is so lightweight that a single-core sub 500MHz system can host 10,000 or more connections, and did back in the day.

Oops, when I saw how old the article was I just skimmed it.

But yeah it worked out really well with Libera.

It's probably worth adding that IRC is so simple to stand up and requires such tiny resources there could be many independent small IRCD's running for smaller organizations and we would never know. I can't be the only one that got tired of drama from some circles of people and stood up my own semi-private nodes for a few circles of my friends. NGIRCD can be configured in less than 5 minutes counting obtaining a LetsEncrypt certificate. Services can take a few more minutes. UnrealIRCD is more feature rich but takes a little longer to configure optimally. I've personally taught many people how to set up NGIRCD. I have no idea how many of them kept one running. Slap a web front-end on it [1] and the bar to access is significantly lowered.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41201487

But it was already kinda fringe, even back in the late 90's. People would talk on AIM or AOL chat, but it was rarer to find IRC users among the hoi polloi.

It is yes but this is part of the benefit.

The internet was much better when it was limited to very techy people too. And so is hacker news for that matter.

We have a saying in the Netherlands: "When you lower the barrier the shit flows over it". It's kinda true.

Gopher was already fringe in 1991 tbh. If you'd even find a gopher server it'd be already outdated in terms of info. And it makes sense. Hyperlinking was just a really really good idea, much better than a list of fixed links in a document.

The whole Gopher idea (fixed links) actually made a bit of a return on old Nokia mobile phones with "WAP" but it never really took off because it sucked so badly. I made some WAP sites at the time but it was pretty terrible. 1-bit black/white images, a very strict layout and protocol. Bleh.

When the WWW came out gopher was pretty much instantly forgotten. And don't forget the whole internet was "fringe" back then.

Rizon checking in.

Not to mention:

1) IRC doesn't support any form of message threading. There's some user conventions like "username:" or "@username" to direct a message to a specific person, but there's no way to make a clear distinction between multiple conversations in a channel. (You can make a new channel for the conversation, I guess, but that's even more hostile than usual to other users trying to follow along.)

2) IRC doesn't support messages longer than ~400-500 bytes. There's an internal hard limit of 512 bytes per line in the IRC protocol, and part of that gets silently consumed by fields like the server hostname and channel name. If you try to send a longer message, it's silently truncated. (Your client will probably echo it back as if it all went through, but other users will see it truncated.) Trying to discuss anything longer than a single line of text typically requires users to post it to an online "pastebin" - adding another external tool you need to make IRC work.

3) There's no reliable, standard way to transfer non-text content on IRC. DCC is unreliable, slow, requires one or both users to set up their firewall to allow incoming connections (!), and only transfers files to one user at a time. All of this combines to make IRC incredibly awkward for discussing audiovisual content, like graphical designs or audio/video. Sure, you can upload screenshots or videos to another web site and post links to IRC - but that's yet another external tool you have to bring in.

4) User authentication and authorization in IRC is incredibly crude. The protocol is built around the understanding that users can change their username at any time (!!), with systems like NickServ bolted on after the fact to "protect" names. User permissions are tied to a user's presence in a channel; private channels are implemented with a single shared password. All of this is "good enough" for a lot of social IRC networks, but completely unsuitable for a business setting which demands a higher level of assurance.

A previous rant of mine on IRC's missing features: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40813743

I don’t want searchable chat, I want my coworkers to write actual documentation. Ephemerality is a feature in this case.

I was sort of on the fence for whether to keep using IRC, for years. I used to have Trillian and later Pidgin as a multi-network chat client, and when using one of those, it makes perfect sense to idle in IRC channels. Then the networks got so complex that multi-network clients no longer worked, and now everything sucks and I have to open 3 different browser tabs (Google, Slack, Discord) on my workstation, iPad, laptop, etc to keep up with what's going on with my work clients, and remember not to close them. Even with the mobile apps, messages are often delayed or don't generate proper notifications.

Without a doubt, the modern era is worse than the experience I had in the 2000s. But, it's true that threaded conversations make it easier to collaborate. Email and voice calls used to work fine for that, though.

Meanwhile, I discovered https://thelounge.chat/, and since I have to open too many browser tabs already, what's one more? I'm pretty happy with it. It fills in the missing features of IRC like sending files and images, and being a bouncer.

IRC is brilliant for text minded development tho. Hanging out in an irc channel, you're likely to see most people just idle their clients with screen or whatever. I've seen project channels simply publish logs of the chat, and every client I used could log text. Private channel creation is trivial as is messaging.

I have only been able to load a discord "page" or whatever maybe once or twice so I don't know if discord style chat is better or not. IRC I can run on a potato lol

I find IRC to be easier to search than the alternatives. I can use standard grep and regexps on my logs, sometimes logs from multiple channels at once. While many other services only support substring or word search, with their custom dialect for time boundaries or author matching; and are slower due to scale.

Any company which goes to the lengths of setting up an IRC server would find it trivial to also set up a bouncer and search index for that server.

That said, these days a Matrix Synapse instance would be an easier choice.

Running a bouncer and logging is still simpler than the alternatives.

That said, I think the lack of threading is a huge downside.

Hard agree. XMPP for sure.

being able to just brute force text searches including using custom scripts is awesome. especially with the trend of search engines going south.