[jolmg]

> But my observation is also that it's dying slowly.

Is it? I'm not on it every day, but I don't really notice a change. Isn't it just that it isn't growing, at least not as much as the explosions of web-based, proprietary platforms like twitter or slack?

[INTPenis]

Well first of all there was no "it" when it came to IRC 15 years ago. There were many huge servers that I never visited like Efnet, Quakenet, dalnet and more.

Me and my little group of hackers would also host our own, and link with other groups around the world.

I think it boils down to accessibility. Even back when I started certain people just couldn't handle the terminal clients so they used Xchat or Mirc. In school in Sweden IRC was actually often pronounced "mirck" because people would refer to the mirc client.

So when web chat came along, with mobile apps too, it just reaches a much wider audience.

So the ones who are left on IRC are old farts, and terminal junkies.

[CodeArtisan]

https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php

In 2004, top 10 networks had together around one million of users. now, it's around 150 000.

Top reason of this decline is gamers leaving the network. Quakenet and GameSurge had like 300K users together, now less than 10K (and probably mostly bots or bouncers).