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by jowsie
1464 days ago
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> Nobody wants to play multiplayer notepad in 2022. The fact IRC is still widely used disproves this quite clearly. I think the real issue is people who like Discord trying to convince people who like IRC that the Discord method is better, and vice versa. It's two pretty different demographics for the most part. |
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Relatively that's not widely used. Back when I used IRC you'd see that many people disconnect from the network during a netsplit if you were a network admin. Honestly if 45k people for the top network is widely used it's just... kinda sad really.
With modern resources you could probably get the the entire top 100 public networks running off a single machine. Look at Undernet, EFNet, DALNet! Those places used to have 100k users each on a slow day, they're barely reaching 10k now.
User counts have halved since I last looked, and have been decimated (literal usage of the word, nice) since the days I actively used IRC. I'll accept that maybe today is a bad day for stats or something, but it doesn't look like there's many good days left.
For clarity's sake I am still in the IRC demographic[2], but that's no use if no bugger else is using it. I'd love to get back into it if there's anywhere not-a-dead-software-support-channel to hang out but every time this comes up the usage stats just get smaller and smaller.
For what it's worth I rarely use Discord and dislike that back-and-forth knowledge for software communities is now locked away behind some rando company's sign-up form. If I ever set up a new community it'll have to be forum based I think.
[1] https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php
[2] Literally my entire career was born in IRC. Wanted to make an IRC bot, figured that out, some other stuff happened, was seen as a tech type, asked to help admin a network I frequented, learned how to admin a Linux box, time passes, got a job doing sysadmin work.
I do miss IRC, made a whole bunch of internet friends on it and it took me down a career path I only sometimes regret.