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by o-__-o 2394 days ago
Away after botnets (and later dogecoin) figured out its a free decentralized comms platform and caused every major enterprise to block all IRC ports out of fear of being owned. At least this was my experience in the early 2000s, which is why I gave up on IRC circa 2006-ish. The death kneel was the lack of a google/apple cloud-backed IRC app, so any mobile use of IRC was pretty much a death wish for your battery (this may have changed but meh damage has already been done). Also all of dividebyzero's reasons listed above

Otherwise, all the major networks are still around and two or three of the really really really hardcore old school users from the 90s may still be around. I still ask random geeks I meet if they used to hang in #FreeBSD back in the day, hoping to reunite with old peoples.
1 comments
gsich 2394 days ago
>The death kneel was the lack of a google/apple cloud-backed IRC app, so any mobile use of IRC was pretty much a death wish for your battery (this may have changed but meh damage has already been done).

Not really. Google/Apple also have a connection (or more) open to their servers, but IRC would kill the battery? It's the usage, not that the connection is open.

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o-__-o 2393 days ago
Yes, really.. because IRC sends traffic all of the time over the connection (PING? PONG!) so your client is always reacting rather than using a cloud-based service to keep the connection alive and only relay specific messages to your device.

IRC is devastating to your battery and back in the 2006-2008 times no one created such a service and thus no one could IRC on the go without a hot phone a dead battery after 2 hours.. pretty limiting to a communication platform if I would say so myself

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