[tjpnz]

I used to use Freenode a lot but in recent years have gone elsewhere.

The community just isn't what it was before and a lot of that comes down to numbers. It wasn't long ago that Freenode was the place to go for help with open source projects but I've noticed more and more an exodus to Slack, Discord et cetera. It's fairly common now to be greeted with a channel topic about this and by that point you're not going to get much help from the lurkers that remain.

I'm not sure what drove that but I do recall there being a fair amount of drama in some channels (more discussion around moderation than the project the channel was about), ban happy ops, flooding and various network related technical issues.

[hombre_fatal]

To put some numbers on the board, you'd think #node.js and #javascript channels on Freenode would be massive given the ubiquity and low entry barrier of the technologies. But there are probably 10 regulars across both channels. I hang out in both daily and it's always the same people. Of course, they also suffer from the toxic personality of veterans that tend to scare away normal people.

Now compare that to Elm's Slack community. A much more niche technology yet an absolutely bustling chat community. And I can repeat this for all sorts of Slack/Discord communities I'm part of. Even my MUD Developer group on Discord is more active than any Freenode channel I'm part of.

Things like "always online" and offline messaging are essential for community building.

IRC never solved this because it requires everyone to have a sufficiently capable client (like paying for IRCCloud or using weechat in tmux on your VPS). Even if you solve it for yourself, you haven't solved it for anyone you talk to who will likely be logged out when they close their laptop.

[parliament32]

>you'd think #node.js and #javascript channels on Freenode would be massive

The entire point of still hanging out on IRC is to avoid node and js-wielding hipsters, so no, I wouldn't expect those channels to be massive. IRC is still the definitive resource for anything related to sysadmin/sre/netops/mailops.

>Things like "always online" and offline messaging

That's also kinda the point. I don't want anyone who joins to be able to search everything I've said in that channel over the last 5 years. Some users may keep personal records, sure, but the history doesn't need to be highly available. Likewise with offline messaging -- if I'm saying something on IRC, I want to talk to "the room". If I want to contact someone specific I could PM them, sure, but I could also just email them like a normal person. IRC is meant to be ephemeral -- and that's what makes it so great compared to Slack/Discord.

[fapjacks]

Interesting you mention these channels. As a longtime IRC user, Freenode's #javascript was or has been one of the least enjoyable channels on the whole network over the last five years or more. I only lurked in there but it was so bad that it was referred to jokingly elsewhere on Freenode as an example of a bad channel.