[myu701]

So, I'm too young to have ever used IRC. This must be a biggish deal to make it #2 on HN homepage. But can someone put this in perspective of how big a deal this is?

On a scale of 'Rando County Legacy ISP-provided email service' to 'Gmail' is shutting down, where does this lie?

IRC is not email, etc. but again, never seen this community.

[dhodell]

I've used IRC for over 20 years and have never heard of this service. On your scale, it's "your second cousin's friend's sister's dog's goldfish had a VPS that went down."

This is #2 on HN because people are reading "Freenode IRC ... is shutting down." That'd be closer to the gmail end of your spectrum. We are not shutting down freenode.

[rhizome]

First of all, you're not too young for IRC, it's still out there! Lots of people! Lots of channels! Depending on your interests your usage could resemble a live-action Reddit.

Second, I don't think this is necessarily a big deal, though I could imagine that channel users liked the convenience of having their channel logged for them. There may even have been an ersatz Slack use-case there that people could easily get used to.

However, channel logging has historically been the responsibility of channel users themselves, so there's a loss of convenience that could easily be taken up by a channel user setting up their own facility: a tiny AWS instance running a bot logging to S3, with a web interface and maybe a search engine. But that takes time and money and maintenance and interest.

However, all of this functionality is out there on the web and internet, and has been used for a long time in various incarnations. I'm sure there are EFNet logs out there that go back well into the 90s.

[txdv]

there are dozens of us! dozens!

[michaelcampbell]

> it's still out there! Lots of people! Lots of channels!

s/channels/code So is COBOL.

[uk_programmer]

IRC is still used massively. It is a relic of the days before corporations took the internet. When it was was still fun. TBH Discord is the closest modern equivalent and the only thing that discord really does better is the embeds and voice.

IRC has a ton of advantages:

1) IRC will run on ancient computers, I was chatting to people on IRC using an Amiga which is 25 years old and will run with virtually no bandwidth. I used to use a 33K modem to speak to my friends after school.

2) Anyone can setup an IRC channel pretty much instantly on a server and you and your friends can start chatting.

3) The message protocol is quite easy to deal with and parse. It also really, really, really fast. Messages are instant, there is zero friction. Slack and Discord are very slow in comparison

4) Building a bots for IRC was super simple. You can be building a bot in minutes in any programming language.

https://pythonspot.com/building-an-irc-bot/

5) IIRC clients allowed you to write scripts to script the client itself.

e.g. MIRC had a scripting language that was just plain text

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIRC_scripting_language

6) You could request files from server and bots IIRC. This was used quite a lot for warez back in the day and much faster than bit-torrent at the time.

7) It is pretty much anonymous. Make a nickname and connect to the server.

8) You can run your own IRC server pretty easily. You download the server software, config some XML/INI files and point your domain at the box. You have your own IRC server.

[barkingcat]

re Discord, the funny thing is that Discord is proprietary, and I'm not sure how exportable any data and/or voice/embeds are when you want to download it out of the service itself.

[uk_programmer]

Also can't script the client, you can't run your own server. Also with MIRC IIRC correctly you could layout the chat windows pretty much anyway you wanted and even have like a desktop background.

Discord is a lot easier to use, but in a lot of ways it is really limited compared to the IRC clients.

[gknoy]

> the only thing that discord really does better is the embeds and voice.

For me, the thing that Discord does really well is having a persistent message history, so I can join a server about a topic, see the pinned posts, read an FAQ channel, and learn a bunch without having to ask a question. That may be improved with IRC now, but at least when I was last using it (wow, 2 decades ago?!) that was a real pain point.

[myself248]

I threw TheLounge on a raspi in the basement and I have persistent message history now. Hit it from any browser, and I have a very Discord-like or Slack-like interface.

Been meaning to check out Convos which looks like it solves much the same problems.

[cbm-vic-20]

IRC is still hanging in there. You can get a taste by using the web UI, no registration required.

1) Go to https://webchat.freenode.net/ 2) Type something into the "Nick" box. 3) Solve the CAPTCHA 4) Hit Start.

Freenode has thousands of channels, there's a bot called "alis" that can help you find something interesting. To do that:

5) type "/msg alis list python -min 50", which will open a chat with alis, which will then show the channels with "python" in the name that have at least 50 users. 6) type "/join #python" to join the channel

Some channels require you to register before you can chat, for that, see https://freenode.net/kb/answer/registration

[ori_b]

IRC is still, in my experience, the best place to get technical help and discussion for most projects.

[echelon]

It absolutely still is.

If I have an in-depth technical question about Rust, I can make a post about it on the Rust subreddit, Stack Overflow, or the Rust community forums, but if I jump in IRC I'll have an answer in under five minutes and an interactive explanation.

IRC is the internet of the 90s and 00s. Without all the spam, advertisement, and noise.

[ghostpepper]

Not to mention that often the author and/or contributors of the technology in question may be available to answer advanced questions.

[Polylactic_acid]

>Without all the spam

You must remember a different IRC to me. Spam bots were a semi frequent thing.

[hguant]

The various haskell IRC channels are some of the best places to learn and get help/mentoring with that language - so many patient, genuinely helpful people. It's one of those things that made me go "Oh, that's what everyone is moaning abut" re demise of the old web etc.

[Operyl]

Having used IRC, not that big of a deal in my opinion. Most channels run their own log archives, and you always have your own.

[barkingcat]

unofficial irc logging services are kinda like the "I don't want to pay anyone, but I want to freeload off someone's netflix account" of the irc age.

If the material was important to someone, they would already be connected with a bouncer or logger of some kind. For people who can't run bouncers, etc, this is a good service, but again - if you really thought it was vital to your work and/or personal life, you would have spent some money to either purchase an irc service (like irccloud, etc) or pay someone to run a proper logging service.

The historical aspects are not nearly as dire in my opinion, - all someone has to do is to get a copy of the archive from this person (who doesn't seem opposed to this idea) - and host it somewhere. Again, the problem is costs - if someone deamed it important enough, they will mirror it.

In this age, probably someone like the Internet Archive since no one will pay for the maintenance (legally, technically, and otherwise).

[1996]

freenode is the place where discussion happens. It is not closing. If it was, it would be equivalent to gmail closing.

The logs - depend on your stance. For what I do, no logs is better. Fewer logs may drive more people back. But here are many other loggers.

FYI, IRC is still very handy to have and deploy in 2020. It is light enough for a small VPS to handle, easy to scale by federating if needed, and the lack of file support and of logs can be a feature to keep everything private for in house deployments.

Just this morning I started to evaluate replacing some Javascript and Go code by some Fortran.

I'm starting to believe in the army motto: "Yesterday technology, tomorrow!"

[snvzz]

>freenode is the place where discussion happens. It is not closing. If it was, it would be equivalent to gmail closing.

And it wouldn't kill IRC. Projects would just relocate to other irc networks, such as oftc. Some new networks might emerge.

[ryanong]

IRC was the chat server. Freenode was THE OSS irc chat server.

There wasn't any other game in town that could scale well enough that was free.

[abstractbeliefs]

Not just was, is! We still hold 90k concurrent users most of the time, and a couple hundred thousand unique users over reasonable spans of time, maybe 3 months?

[hombre_fatal]

I think this would be useful: how many unique users have sent at least one message in the last 24 hours?

I'm part of some of the channels you think would be largest on Freenode like #javascript and #nodejs. There may be hundreds of people in the online user list, but it's literally the same 10 people talking every day.

There's 10x that number of people talking daily in just Elm's Slack. I'm on three javascript-related webdev Discord servers that that each have at least 100 unique users interacting daily.

I have to wonder if 90% of people connected to IRC are just echoes in the system, autoreconnecting from old hardware long after their owners have moved on.

In these threads people always say "nah, IRC is doing great!" But frankly I don't think people realize how much IRC communities have shrunk. Its lunch has been eaten and it feels like the only people still around on IRC are aging people who once used it in its prime.

[dhodell]

Many IRC communities have shrunk. Different reasons. Things like Discord and mumble, combined with more collaboration and multiplayer competition in games took gamers away from IRC and crippled networks like Gamesurge.

Social media, especially things like Twitter and the various short video sharing services took away the "general chat" demographic -- partially because folks who were closer (real-life friends and family) like to feel closer, and folks who are not tend to be younger, and the younger demographic trends towards newer technologies.

Tech stuff has held up on freenode for a while, but as you point out this isn't always the case. I would argue that freenode is probably safe from too much decline for a while yet -- those of us who are "aging people who once used [IRC] in its prime" (I'm 36, guy, "aging" is a bit harsh :)) also tend to be people with a lot of experience in $technical_topic. If you want to ask questions about $technical_topic, and the people with experience are on IRC, that's where you go.

You've pointed out a lot of Javascript-related stuff is not on IRC. Javascript is a relatively new technology (compared to IRC), Node is relatively newer, and Elm newer yet. The boom in web technologies, and the ability to run native applications written in JS has caused that community to surge. It's also relatively easier to get into Javascript than it is to get into (say) C. So you attract more people, and you're going to attract younger people, and you're going to have a really diverse audience for a wide range of topics. All of a sudden a single channel on a chat network doesn't make much sense anymore, and running an IRC network yourself doesn't seem like fun, so you decide to use Discord or Slack. I think this makes a lot of sense for lots of communities.

For other (especially smaller, or very niche) technical communities, IRC is still a good solution. It's not fair to say that "its lunch has been eaten" -- it'll remain relevant until text-based messaging is no longer the most accessible way to communicate. But there are other, different solutions for similar problems that do a better job of catering to specific audiences. And that's just fine.

Unfortunately, it's kind of a PITA to get unique counts from server stats, which are mostly aggregates. So I can't answer that question. But Freenode's a rather active network.

[neilv]

Agreed. Freenode was (and should still be, IMHO) the go-to real-time chat for open source projects.

I didn't realize how important at the time it was being founded. Rob Levin was an online acquaintance, and one day he started asking about how to fund an open source community service with donations. I was interested in open source and non-profits, so he and I talked a bit about that, but I didn't volunteer to help. Next thing I knew, he'd started Freenode, and projects flocked to it.

[ghostpepper]

If Freenode was shutting down it would be closer to "gmail is shutting down" IMHO.

[maccard]

According to another comment in this thread, Freenode has 90k CCU, with hundreds of thousands over a period of a few months. The best number I can find for gmail is here [0], which shows Gmail had 72 million active users on android 6 years ago. Sorry to say but Freenode shutting down wouldn't even be a blip compared to gmail shutting down

[0] https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/article/2014/tops-of-...

[heinrich5991]

I believe it was meant in proportion to the size of email vs IRC.

> Sorry to say but

Please just drop that prefix.

[ghostpepper]

The scale requested was actually:

> On a scale of 'Rando County Legacy ISP-provided email service' to 'Gmail' is shutting down, where does this lie?

[barkingcat]

yah, but this particular service, which is a logging server run by an individual, isn't really all that significant in the grand scheme of things.

[ken]

This is just one logging service, not any actual IRC servers. So today's news is not necessarily a huge deal.

IRC as a system, though, is massively important. I'd say it's like the Twitter of the first half (so far) of the internet. When the (first) Gulf War began, the first reports were via IRC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7990835

[idclip]

If gmail had a dad who was more famous and more successful in a world no one remembered anymore.

Think of the father in “there will be blood”.