[wkat4242]

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.

[abstractbeliefs]

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.

[RiverCrochet]

IRC is so lightweight that a single-core sub 500MHz system can host 10,000 or more connections, and did back in the day.

[FireBeyond]

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.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Australia

[grogenaut]

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.

[Dalewyn]

>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.

[chuckadams]

> 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.

[Clamchop]

Not lasers, but something even better. Randall Munroe once described CRTs as "desktop particle accelerators".

[baruch]

And here we are working on systems with dual 400Gbps and sending data out of storage clusters at 5 TiB/s.

[kjs3]

Still, that's insane, the country had less than 100Mbps.

It's not 'insane'. Bandwidth goes a long way when you aren't downloading 100Mb JS frameworks and watching cat videos all day.

[Borg3]

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 :)

[wkat4242]

Oops, when I saw how old the article was I just skimmed it.

But yeah it worked out really well with Libera.

[Meekro]

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.

[1] https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2024

[LinuxBender]

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.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41201487

[Meekro]

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.

[LinuxBender]

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.

[1] - https://ircv3.net/software/servers.html

[progval]

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

[Meekro]

Pretty interesting! I find these attempts to remake IRC fairly intriguing. I've read your description, and it's really cool how you've re-invented server-to-server routing. Unfortunately, it wasn't clear how services operate, though. Just a couple thoughts:

1. Is there still a benefit to having more than one server? My understanding is that IRC networks had multiple servers partially because because having >50k open network sockets was difficult on 1995-era UNIX-like operating systems. That's not really a problem anymore. I guess multiple servers is a way to achieve load-balancing and fault-tolerance for servers going down, though. But then again, the services database still has to exist somewhere, right? That's probably still a single point of failure?

2. From a user perspective, an IRC replacement ought to compete with Discord. That means support for posting images and videos, audio/video chat, offline history, easy switching between desktop and phone, deep and granular admin controls, etc. I'd love for there to be an open source & open protocol option here, but I'm terrified to even imagine an RFC that implements all of this in a way that works in practice.

[Loughla]

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.

[gunapologist99]

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.

[jayflux]

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.

[RF_Savage]

Does the Twitch IRC side still work? As their chat is based on IRC. I did participate on a few streams chat with a normal IRC client a few years back.

Ah, Xircon, Quakenet and Counter-Strike. Those were the days.

[ekimekim]

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).

[wkat4242]

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.

[wkat4242]

It is yes but this is part of the benefit.

The internet was much better when it was limited to very techy people too. And so is hacker news for that matter.

We have a saying in the Netherlands: "When you lower the barrier the shit flows over it". It's kinda true.

[mattl]

Sadly the number of people on IRC took a huge hit the last few years especially channels previously on Freenode.

[paxys]

How is it "funny" when the Freenode saga is literally what this article is about?

[blooalien]

> "I don't think IRC will really die, it will become a more fringey thing though. Probably more than it already is."

Like Gopher? Still out there and bein' used. Very "fringe" now though.

[wkat4242]

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.

[HamedEmine]

Agreed, waves from DALnet!

[Dalewyn]

Rizon checking in.