What makes IRC special isn't the protocol but the community, and that community has been steadily shrinking month after month, year after year. The average age of regulars continues to go up. Unless its popularity sees some kind of resurgence and the current trends reverse, IRC will most definitely die.
Funny, I think the exact opposite. All social spaces are about the people/community, which mostly adapts itself around whatever space they happen to be around, be it a park, shopping map, IRC, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
What's special about IRC is that it's really easy to set up. If all of the social platforms collapsed, you could set up and use IRC with your group of friends until the next social platform blows up and "everyone" moves to it.
If a partial/regional apocalypse happened, you could set up and run IRC.
The biggest weirdness on IRC compared to all other platforms is that you NEED to be online 24/7 with your client or you'll miss stuff. There is no "backlog" except for the one you see yourself.
On the other hand it's a good thing, people can't just join and scroll down 10 years of chat history.
But you'll also be completely unfindable unless your client is online.
In addition to the bots others mentioned, there are web front-ends to provide scrollback. Convos [1a], TheLounge [2a], KiwiIRC+KiwiBNC [3]
I prefer to instead run irssi+otr in a GNU screen session from a random VM/VPS provider. Most others prefer tmux. I'm just stuck in the past I suppose for using GNU screen.
There used to be whole websites dedicated to archiving IRC channels. Last time I tried to find one, I couldn't. It's a shame, really. It used to work as a forum you could go back to and find answers.
Yea all major channels used to run logger bots for themselves at least.
Then there were a few "unofficial" ones that just came in and lurked without telling anyone they were logging everything and publishing it on the internet. A bit of a breach of trust IMO.
These had always been public channels. Saying it's a breach of trust that an unofficial archive exists feels a bit heavy-handed. It's like complaining about the web archive.
If I can suggest a different perspective: that lack of scrollback is what makes IRC special. When you join a channel, instead of just scrolling back to whatever topic you care about and joining the subthread, you get caught up on what you missed by engaging with the channel instead. It drives community this way.
I love irc, but irc is probably more problematic to manage for users and admins/moderators than discord.
I don't like the discord server model, but it allows the platform to prevent spam more easily and to put the responsibility on server owners.
Searching chat history is also a big plus.
IRC sets a high bar for users to choose a client, create an auth account etc. So obviously many of them are power users, and those users are qualitative.
Discord is just much easier for everybody, and it makes money.
I think your statements about average age and number of users is probably correct.
I would say this is another indication of how people who grew up with the internet, and who generally base their "community" and "friends" in corporate digital products, are incapable of pushing back on corporate overreach.
Are you finding it difficult as a young professional to buy a house, keep up with subscriptions, save for retirement? Don't worry, you'll be screwed 10x worse by the time your of retirement age.
The "i've got nothing to hide from constant survielance", "just use chrome" crowd is digging their own financial grave.
This makes me wonder if there will ever be a day in the distance future where the final Bitcoin node will be turned off forever vanquishing the cryptocurrency to the digital graveyard.
Funny that they mention freenode because it did burn to the ground 2 years after this article.
However it was reborn as Libera which is once again doing great. If you don't know the story, Google it. I don't want to drag up the past, it's better forgotten.
I don't think IRC will really die, it will become a more fringey thing though. Probably more than it already is.
It's not so funny, because this article was written at the time freenode was burning to the ground, and the article suggests that it would be very easy for everyone to move to libera if it turned out to be the better option.
And that it worked so well is the point of the article!
IRC is highly resilient because it's simple to set up, the clients and servers are free software and can be endlessly and independently configured to talk to each other, and it's light on resources - both server, client, and bandwidth.
I'm on terrible, legacy satellite internet (ie, not starlink, with 700ms-1.2s round trip times), and IRC is the only chat system that works fine.
Hah, the general issue with IRC was (even without DDoS) the bandwidth.
I went to Monash University in Australia, starting in 1994. We had an EFnet server (biggest, or one of the biggest). I was just a student so I don't know the specifics, but it was only allowed to run from 6pm to 6am because otherwise it used most of the University's bandwidth, if not the entire country:
At the time, Australia's internet capacity overseas was a SINGLE 1.5Mbit link. Telstra did buy a 45Mbit link in late 1995, and then another in early 1996.
Still, that's insane, the country had less than 100Mbps.
I remember working for a web design company in the mid-late 90s and we had servers at a datacenter in Melbourne. I remember downloading Netscape Navigator (1.1n!) and being blown away by how fast it downloaded, and then realizing for the duration of the download I was using something in the order of 5% of the country's international bandwidth.
In the fall of 96 or 97? I was getting some freshmen setup with computers. I was on the football team so we were on campus (WUSTL) 7 days before school started so almost no one was on campus. We were trying to download navigator from tucows (I think) and I remembered wuarchive still existed and was on campus. We had 100 meg in the buildings and fiber backbone. We pulled NN at 5.5Mb/s... it finished so fast we downloaded it a second time to make sure. And I said "We won't see speeds like that for 7-10 years." I was pretty correct. That's when I realized that live video would be doable but not for a while.
>Still, that's insane, the country had less than 100Mbps.
It's easy to take for granted just how much Fucking God Damn Technology we have mundane access to today.
That 14700K or 7800X3D CPU? That's more powerful than entire national supercomputers back in the day.
A 64 gigabyte stick of DDR5 RAM? Bill Gates once said 640 kilobytes is enough for everyone. And you probably needed multiple sticks.
A 20TB hard drive? With helium? Do you understand the bandwidth of a station wagon full of hard drives barreling down the freeway in the 1980s?! Wait, nobody probably even knows what a station wagon is anymore...
1gbit/s internet? 10gbit/s ethernet? We sung the melody of dial up modems conducting international diplomacy better than any politicians.
360Hz liquid crystal display monitor with billions of colors and millions of pixels? We used to completely evacuate air out of glass or ceramic tubes and fire fucking lasers with them to show monotone pictures in neon orange or green.
Modern, minimalist user interfaces? To hell with them, Windows 95 was the pinnacle of human engineered interface design.
...Wait, did we actually devolve? Maybe it was a mistake to make sand think after all.
> Bill Gates once said 640 kilobytes is enough for everyone.
Gates has always denied saying this, and no one has ever produced the original quote. It’s more like something IBM would have said about the PC, they’re the ones that created that limit.
Remember Twisted.Dal.Net server? :) Admin of it did some magikery on his server and hosted 50k local clients!! :) And it was 2001 or so... Thats crazy :)
IRC feels more fringe, but it's actually held up surprisingly well. According to the stats, it's currently about half as popular as it was in 2000 when I started[1]. That's better than I would have guessed.
It's probably worth adding that IRC is so simple to stand up and requires such tiny resources there could be many independent small IRCD's running for smaller organizations and we would never know. I can't be the only one that got tired of drama from some circles of people and stood up my own semi-private nodes for a few circles of my friends. NGIRCD can be configured in less than 5 minutes counting obtaining a LetsEncrypt certificate. Services can take a few more minutes. UnrealIRCD is more feature rich but takes a little longer to configure optimally. I've personally taught many people how to set up NGIRCD. I have no idea how many of them kept one running. Slap a web front-end on it [1] and the bar to access is significantly lowered.
ngIRCd looks good! To be honest, these days I'm surprised that ChanServ/NickServ type stuff isn't integrated directly into the IRCd. I guess it gets complicated if you have multiple servers and they have to decide who controls services, but would simplify single-server arrangements.
Part of IRCv3's roadmap [1] is to implement integrated services. Ergo apparently has done it never tested it and Unreal has apparently developed an addon which I was unaware of. I too would like to see more services integrated into the IRC daemon.
We're also (slowly) working on a networked IRCd with mesh networking (instead of spanning trees, to avoid netsplits) and integrated services: https://github.com/Libera-Chat/sable
I would argue that IRC absolutely is already super fringe. People have memories of it, but I'm betting active use of IRC today is limited to very tech people.
But it was already kinda fringe, even back in the late 90's. People would talk on AIM or AOL chat, but it was rarer to find IRC users among the hoi polloi.
IRC was home to a lot of gaming communities, it was basically Discord before that existed. There used to be live commentary in channels (Twitch replaced this).
I don’t believe any gamers use it today but fringe-tech communities still use it, I think that’s what the parent is referring to.
Yes, their chat is still compatible with IRC, albeit with lots of extensions (which you can opt into using IRCv3 capabilitiy negotiation). More recently they've been adding UI elements on the main site that are web API powered instead of chat though (eg. polls, sending bits).
True but in the early 90s there was nothing else yet. But back then the whole internet was totally fringe of course.
Still, MIRC (as a client) was a common thing for all computer geeks until 2005-2010 or so in my circles. After that people started moving to whatsapp and the like. This includes people in the hacker/maker and game/lanparty community so very techy and niche but there it was still big back then.
Gopher was already fringe in 1991 tbh. If you'd even find a gopher server it'd be already outdated in terms of info. And it makes sense. Hyperlinking was just a really really good idea, much better than a list of fixed links in a document.
The whole Gopher idea (fixed links) actually made a bit of a return on old Nokia mobile phones with "WAP" but it never really took off because it sucked so badly. I made some WAP sites at the time but it was pretty terrible. 1-bit black/white images, a very strict layout and protocol. Bleh.
When the WWW came out gopher was pretty much instantly forgotten. And don't forget the whole internet was "fringe" back then.
The article makes a solid point about the timelessness of a protocol versus a service. I will never get to relive my memories of CompuServe, but just last weekend I was able to goof around with Microsoft Comic Chat 2.5 under WINE. It connected to a server just fine and it was 1999 all over again. I really wish we would see new Internet (No not web, Internet) protocols. The last one I have seen get any resemblance of traction is the Gemini protocol and that is still a very niche thing.
IRC is terrible for work collaboration. I say this as a long time IRC user. Conversations are not searchable, and if you're offline you are unable to follow along with what's going on with your colleagues. To make it anywhere near usable, you need to run IRC bouncers, chat loggers, search indexers .. at that point, just use something made for collaboration.
1) IRC doesn't support any form of message threading. There's some user conventions like "username:" or "@username" to direct a message to a specific person, but there's no way to make a clear distinction between multiple conversations in a channel. (You can make a new channel for the conversation, I guess, but that's even more hostile than usual to other users trying to follow along.)
2) IRC doesn't support messages longer than ~400-500 bytes. There's an internal hard limit of 512 bytes per line in the IRC protocol, and part of that gets silently consumed by fields like the server hostname and channel name. If you try to send a longer message, it's silently truncated. (Your client will probably echo it back as if it all went through, but other users will see it truncated.) Trying to discuss anything longer than a single line of text typically requires users to post it to an online "pastebin" - adding another external tool you need to make IRC work.
3) There's no reliable, standard way to transfer non-text content on IRC. DCC is unreliable, slow, requires one or both users to set up their firewall to allow incoming connections (!), and only transfers files to one user at a time. All of this combines to make IRC incredibly awkward for discussing audiovisual content, like graphical designs or audio/video. Sure, you can upload screenshots or videos to another web site and post links to IRC - but that's yet another external tool you have to bring in.
4) User authentication and authorization in IRC is incredibly crude. The protocol is built around the understanding that users can change their username at any time (!!), with systems like NickServ bolted on after the fact to "protect" names. User permissions are tied to a user's presence in a channel; private channels are implemented with a single shared password. All of this is "good enough" for a lot of social IRC networks, but completely unsuitable for a business setting which demands a higher level of assurance.
I see only the 4th point as a real problem, which could be solved by fragmenting the network more, like connecting a server to it and not connecting the user directly (UI must reduce the visual noise of netsplits that should be a lot more frequent this way).
The other 3 are UX matters, 2nd point cracks me up because hexchat could split a message in batches of privmsg's eleven years ago, spam control is totally local (so being banned for spamming isn't a given), servers can nowadays buffer a lot of text and throttle messages, albeit bandwidth is mostly free.
Being them UX matters, they aren't worth much, thus IRC will remain broken because there are like two thousands IM competing software that dealt marvellously with those problems.
1-3 are features. Keep chat messages short. Use git or NFS for sharing files. 4 can be solved by putting the server behind a VPN that does better (2FA) auth and then custom NickServ backed by your auth
100%. No need for bouncers, search indexers or chat loggers.
Real time communication should be used for real time communication. Send me an email if it's async, or call me if it's urgent and I'm not available via normal RTC channels. People want Slack etc to be an everything client, which is why we have the gross bloat we have.
Also, you spend a day off and if the channel is active, it's a chore trying to get back on track if the team does not have better suited communication methods. Quasi real time discussion on a bug is great, but it's better to add the final findings on the ticket/PR. Same for features, draft up a doc afterwards. Slack and the lack should be considered transient and important information put on more permanent and more brows-able forms (Wiki, document repo, ticket system,...).
It’s not a feature. People use it this way and expect a history and search feature. It’s the way it is. Not providing a feature is not a feature. It’s an inconvenience at best, and a lack of respect at worst when you present it like people are doing it wrong.
I was sort of on the fence for whether to keep using IRC, for years. I used to have Trillian and later Pidgin as a multi-network chat client, and when using one of those, it makes perfect sense to idle in IRC channels. Then the networks got so complex that multi-network clients no longer worked, and now everything sucks and I have to open 3 different browser tabs (Google, Slack, Discord) on my workstation, iPad, laptop, etc to keep up with what's going on with my work clients, and remember not to close them. Even with the mobile apps, messages are often delayed or don't generate proper notifications.
Without a doubt, the modern era is worse than the experience I had in the 2000s. But, it's true that threaded conversations make it easier to collaborate. Email and voice calls used to work fine for that, though.
Meanwhile, I discovered https://thelounge.chat/, and since I have to open too many browser tabs already, what's one more? I'm pretty happy with it. It fills in the missing features of IRC like sending files and images, and being a bouncer.
IRC is brilliant for text minded development tho. Hanging out in an irc channel, you're likely to see most people just idle their clients with screen or whatever. I've seen project channels simply publish logs of the chat, and every client I used could log text. Private channel creation is trivial as is messaging.
I have only been able to load a discord "page" or whatever maybe once or twice so I don't know if discord style chat is better or not. IRC I can run on a potato lol
I find IRC to be easier to search than the alternatives. I can use standard grep and regexps on my logs, sometimes logs from multiple channels at once. While many other services only support substring or word search, with their custom dialect for time boundaries or author matching; and are slower due to scale.
If you start a company and spend a non-trivial amount of your time, effort and money into handcrafting and customizing a perfect IRC server, that company is going nowhere.
If you know IRC well enough to want to mandate it for your company, you can probably set the server up in an hour or three. You can then install https://thelounge.chat/ and have your employees log into that for browser and mobile apps vs. native IRC clients.
What money would it require? Any leftover PC from the last 15 years can run the server.
Aggressive delegation to third parties is how we end up with all these complex services. A chat system, a ticket service, a git interface, should be pretty trivial to install and maintain. And consistent too.
Worked at Red Hat, the amount of anger around decommissioning our internal IRC servers was HUGE (and hell, even then, half the company was using/happy with GChat, the other half on Slack. People who actually paid attention to both were very minority).
Loved having IRC at Red Hat from a nostalgia perspective but it was a total disaster from a business standpoint.
Also, at red hat, we’d complain to the whole company about paper towels vs air dryers in the bathrooms, so naturally the complaints about losing IRC would be expected! It’s refreshing to be at a place where I can make a decision without getting second guessed and derailed by someone totally unrelated to what I’m doing.
Worked at a few places that did just that. One used SIP phones for actual voice chat. Liked it very much.
To respond to the sibling comment: we had text files on a share that we could actually grep. Far better than the inexact, incomplete search functionality that seems to have become normal these days.
I've always thought Hacker News could do with a chat room, and given how simple it is (and free), IRC would probably best fit the bill. Searching Hacker News shows that some people have proposed different chat rooms but nothing's stuck really. I reckon it'd need a "chat" tab up the top. Nice-to-haves would be adding an optional web-based client, and tying it into your actual HN login.
I've never set up IRC before though, so I have no idea if this is actually feasible.
I began using IRC before the age of 10, creating fond memories along the way. But let's face the harsh reality: IRC has largely become obsolete for most purposes. The alternatives available now are not only more user-friendly but also offer superior functionality for the general population, so I highly doubt IRC will become popular once again anytime. While it is sad, why would anyone choose to use outdated 90s technology that poses challenges for the average user when there are more advanced and accessible options?
I think things like discord leave users like me behind. I have 3rd world level internet and computing resources to the extent that I can't use things like discord because I can't afford memory and bandwidth. It does cause me discomfort to see posts like yours, I mean yeah good internet should be available to all but all I have is very limitted phone access. IRC can run on potatos so its like it makes me feel still connected a bit.
For me, IRC stopped being attractive when Freenode changed owner. They broke it in two months and with no way to migrate nicks between servers, many lost their registered nicks on the channels that moved to other servers, and I had no want to stay on Freenode for the channels that stayed.
Identity is a major problem with IRC. Losing mine cut a core tether for me, it wasn't my space any more.
Ohh, IRC will eventually die, unfortunately. Why? When last dinosaurs like me vanish. I love IRC, I met hell of people on IRC in golden times.. 1998-2004. IRC will be always special in my hearh. I wrote IRC bots, IRC servers.
Currently, I still run my own IRC server for friends, I have syslog channel where bots are idling and msg importand/criticial messages from my infra (semi-centrliazed logging). I see no reason to move away from it.
“Hey, kids! It's your old buddy Steve King telling you that if they ban a book in your school, haul your ass to the nearest bookstore or library ASAP and find out what they don't want you to read.” - Stephen King, 2023-01-18
So, I was a decently heavy IRC user back in its heyday. Today, "the kids" are all about Discord -- and I do mean the geek coding creative kids most like me but younger and I absolutely see why.
I think I do lament the abscence of a more aggressive "why not just update IRC to be like Discord?"
WAY easier said than done, and I think Matrix is trying, but I suppose the most frustrating thing is trying to tell the young'ns, hey this has a strong chance of enshittifying
Because one is a protocol and another is a platform. To quote from [0]:
After 30+ years, email is still unencrypted; meanwhile WhatsApp went from unencrypted to full e2ee in a year. People are still trying to standardize sharing a video reliably over IRC; meanwhile, Slack lets you create custom reaction emoji based on your face.
This isn’t a funding issue. If something is truly decentralized, it becomes very difficult to change, and often remains stuck in time. That is a problem for technology, because the rest of the ecosystem is moving very quickly, and if you don’t keep up you will fail. There are entire parallel industries focused on defining and improving methodologies like Agile to try to figure out how to organize enormous groups of people so that they can *move as quickly as possible* because it is so critical.
When the technology itself is more conducive to stasis than movement, that’s a problem. A sure recipe for success has been to take a 90’s protocol that was stuck in time, centralize it, and iterate quickly.
I got into IRC multiple times, but I really have no desire to go back to it. The fact that I have to set up a ZNC bouncer if I want messages to show up on multiple devices kind of feels like, well, something from the 90's.
I feel like Matrix is considerably less annoying, while being federated and relatively easy to set up.
Sorry, what does Matrix fail at? IRC is a huge pain in the ass if you want to use more than one device. This was fine in the 90's when people only had one computer, but now pretty much everyone has at least two, and usually more. ZNC is a pain in the ass.
IRC can absolutely die when the people running the networks and the servers stop doing so. A number of IRC networks have died over the years. IRC is just another service built, ran and operated by volunteers. If IRC was more popular, you'd hear about the same moderation concerns social networks are dealing with. I banned entire countries (hello, Malaysia!) in my time as network admin.
To my knowledge, the core of Twitch chat is just IRC[0]. They've obviously extended it a fair bit, but it's probably the largest service I can think of that leans on the protocol.
I visit a /g/ adjacent channel regularly on Rizon. I've also interacted with two software projects on Libera in the last 6 months. So yes, it is still active.