[rasengan]

I just wanted to take a moment and share with the HN community that IRC is definitely very alive and kicking! There are great channels for thousands of amazing projects, communities and teams spread across so many great IRC Networks, from Freenode [1] to OFTC [2], to Rizon [3], to DALnet [4], to tildeverse [5], Snoonet [6], Quakenet [7], EFnet [8], IRCnet [9] among other networks [10].

IRC is no longer difficult to use; there are great software applications across nearly every device that can be named which can work with and present the RFC1459 protocol splendidly, including weechat [11], KiwiIRC [12], Textual [13], Palaver [14], to mIRC [15], and AdiIRC [16], among others!

IRC has bots hosted by the community that can hook into github like bitbot [17] and supybot [18] among others.

You can also stay connected to IRC using an IRC bouncer like KiwiBNC [19], znc [20], IRCCloud [21], Quassel [22], Bitlbee [23] or shamlessplug jbnc [24].

[1] https://freenode.net

[2] https://oftc.net

[3] https://rizon.net

[4] https://www.dal.net

[5] https://tildeverse.org

[6] https://snoonet.org/

[7] https://quakenet.org/

[8] https://efnet.org

[9] https://ircnet.com

[10] https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php

[11] https://weechat.org/

[12] https://kiwiirc.com

[13] https://codeux.com/textual

[14] https://palaverapp.com/

[15] https://mirc.com/

[16] https://adiirc.com/

[17] https://github.com/jesopo/bitbot

[18] https://github.com/Supybot/Supybot

[19] https://kiwiirc.com/

[20] https://znc.in

[21] https://irccloud.com/

[22] https://quassel-irc.org/

[23] https://www.bitlbee.org/

[24] https://github.com/realrasengan/jbnc

Edit: Added a few that I accidentally left out. Thank you all! If I left anyone else out I apologize - IRC is so decentralized, spread out, and... alive... that it's hard to name all of the amazing projects, networks and implementations out there!

[buovjaga]

The awesome list: https://github.com/davisonio/awesome-irc

Supybot's successor is Limnoria: https://github.com/ProgVal/Limnoria

GitHub plugin: https://github.com/ProgVal/Supybot-plugins/tree/master/GitHu...

Btw. on the topic of bouncers, Simon Ser is developing a new one in Go: https://git.sr.ht/~emersion/soju

[Polylactic_acid]

IRC is still alive in the fact that people still use it, but its dying (less people use it over time) in a way that will never be overcome.

IRC is lacking so many critical features that people consider the fundamentals of IM now. IRCv3 has been in development for forever and they still aren't done and even if they finished it it would never make it to all the irc servers and clients.

At this point it makes sense to join most other open source projects in moving to Matrix which still has active development and the ability to actually push out new spec changes in the current decade.

[wdutch]

I think IRC will always have a place in certain communities.

I drop into IRC whenever I need help with an Arduino project or want to catchup with old colleagues. From my own personal experience, all the open source communities I get involved with use IRC and I have never known one use Matrix, sometimes this is for personal reasons and sometimes for work. This probably depends on what techie circles you move in.

I've also noticed IRC is more popular in certain countries. Anecdotally Brazil and Sweden seem to have fairly large communities of nontechnical people on IRC.

Maybe for some people, IRC does what they want and they don't need any updated spec.

[TylerE]

The mere fact that we always see several people jumping in to assert how IRC is alive and kicking is in fact a giveaway that it, if not actually dying, is at least starting to smell a bit funny. (And frankly I say - good riddance! It's a protocol that's at least a decade past it's sell-by date, modern options are so much better)

[tastroder]

People often don't seem to use modern alternatives like matrix though. I often see people switching to whatever the popular walled garden of the year is instead. Personally I prefer an open ecosystem to animated GIFs, even if it might occasionally smell.

[airstrike]

If only I could build weechat from source on windows! If anyone out there is willing to provide binaries I'd be glad to buy you coffee so I can switch over from irssi

mIRC is what got me into programming, actually... I miss the good old days

[Geeflow]

My first programming projects were scripts and modules for eggdrop. Every now and then I get a nostalgia flash. :) Surprisingly, some of those are still being used... 20 years after the last release.

[hkt]

Mine were mIRC scripts for banning spammers. Eventually we had a community of people writing bots in perl, PHP, and loads of other languages. I was introduced to Unix by means of wanting to run irssi in screen so I could collect messages even when I was offkyine. It is no exaggeration to say IRC is completely responsible for my career, far more so than education!

[rasengan]

Another option is to try cygwin [1] as it has a weechat build [2]. Weechat also runs under WSL [3].

[1] https://cygwin.com/

[2] https://www.cygwin.com/packages/summary/weechat.html

[3] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10

[graton]

Seems like you can run it under Windows Subsystem for Linux.

[kick]

What happened to irc.com? It seems like you had pretty big plans for it (especially with the letter you wrote on it), but it doesn't seem to have gone anywhere.

[rasengan]

Keep an eye out! :)

[toxik]

How can you not list QuakeNet?!

[_e]

irc.mtv.com isn't on the list

[efdee]

No IRCnet or EFnet mention?

I don't want to be a part of this.

[rasengan]

Agreed and has been included now, I apologize for that! Please take part in this! IRC is community.

[efdee]

I was just kidding about the not taking part ;-)

[rasengan]

Yay xD

Nevertheless, thank you for bringing these up!

[josteink]

> I just wanted to take a moment and share with the HN community that IRC is definitely very alive and kicking!

Yes IRC has an impressive list of servers, clients and networks built up over the last 3-4 decades.

Outside the major hubs (freenode) and FOSS channels though, actual usage seems to be going down.

IRC is no longer the “default” for chat, like it used to be.

And I say that as someone heavily invested in IRC, operating an IRC-network for almost 2 decades.

[em-bee]

this list exemplifies the biggest issue i have with IRC. it's not federated. these are all islands, and i'd have to sign up on each one of them to join the community there.

that said, none of the newer alternatives are any better unfortunately.

it seems jabber really was the only federated system with any moderate success, and maybe matrix is getting there too with its ability to integrate different services.

[badsectoracula]

FWIW you do not need to 'sign up' on IRC, just pick up an unused nickname and you're in. No registration or anything necessary.

[em-bee]

i don't know if there are irc networks that require nick registratin, but there for sure are channels on freenode that you can't enter without a registered nick.

but that's not the issue. the issue is that i can't maintain a global identity, and that i have to add each network into any configuration instead of just sending a message to anyone on any network without creating an identity on that network (even if it's just picking a nickname).

some of this could be worked around in the client if the client has an uptodate list of irc networks so that sending a message to embee@freenode would automatically connect your client to freenode, make you pick a nickname and send the message.

hmm, that's an interresting thought experiment.

how could this be made seamless without inviting spam.

[snvzz]

On DOS, there's mtcp's ircjr.

On AmigaOS, amirc (which many clients cloned the UI of) and wookiechat.

Even kolibriOS ships an irc client.

It's a nice, simple protocol that's human readable and imposes very little overhead on the clients.

[anthk]

I miss gopher support on kolibriOS, it's the brother "simple" protocol for hypermedia. No TLS support as IRC, but you can either: - use TOR over a gopher client. - use and promote Gemini in paralell.

With Bitlbee and sacc(1) I can access even HN via Gopher and comment it on Telegram via sic(1). Magical and my setup could work even under a 286 with Minix2.

[snvzz]

Gopherus will run on dos on a 8086. I believe it will even work with less than 512KB.

[anthk]

Yeah, I know that. There are even some clients for the ZX Spectrum Next.

[snvzz]

The spectrum not-next would be cool.

The next is very OP.

[anthk]

I wonder if an Altair could use Gopher over serial<->ESP wifi.

[Avamander]

You've missed the best IRC bouncer-client there is - Quassel.

[eloahx]

jbnc :D

[matheusmoreira]

Can IRC be used through Tor and with end-to-end encryption?

[hkt]

It depends on the network. Freenode has a tor ingress: https://freenode.net/news/tor-online

You can connect with SSL and optionally SASL (as well as cloaking your IP) but this is encrypted to the server. Most of IRC is public anyway though so E2E doesn't make total sense.

[LinuxBender]

Yes, IRC servers can support or enforce TLS for the transport and end users can use OTR (Off The Record) with many IRC clients. IRC uses TCP which Tor supports. There are IRC servers on Tor. Here [1] is an example of WeeChat + OTR. OTR is E2E encryption.

[1] - https://github.com/mmb/weechat-otr

[bluedays]

IRC is where you go to play the idle game, right?

[anthk]

Add Bitlbee to the list and you can do magic.

[Avamander]

Bitlbee needs some work. I don't think there's a single plugin for it that actually works properly.

[ekianjo]

They do but break the functionality of the base install too

[tr33house]

I also use mosh to maintain a constant connection to a remote server with an irc client

[admax88q]

www.dal.net not dal.net

[rasengan]

Fixed, thank you!

[admax88q]

yay!

[andarleen]

Is Rizon still the crime haven it was?

[amyjess]

From what I understand, most of the fansubbing community there has moved to Discord.