[boredemployee]

tangential question: are there still any IRC servers and (small) channels with cool people? I recently lost a virtual friend I had talked to for over 20 years, all thanks to some random mIRC channel back in the day. he ran the server with a bunch of ppl for so long. so sad. i really miss the times when we could have fun with just plain text.

[pabs3]

There are lots of IRC servers still running, both big and small, some of them are listed here:

https://netsplit.de/

[0xEF]

I've been using IRC on and off for three decades, now. It will never be what it was, so don't expect much. Most of channels are kept alive by bots and otherwise idling accounts like mine that drop into the background of our desktop and get forgotten about for days, sometimes weeks at a time. The political channels on a few servers are, of course, active but you'll not find any useful discourse there since it's all being driven by conservative and liberal zealots. I assume they are not what you meant by "cool people."

Whatever cool people there were have either died or saw the writing on the wall as IRC slowly faded into obscurity with the introduction of better (debatable) chat systems, especially these days with things like Discord or Slack that do every IRC does in some capacity and more, perhaps most importantly simply making chat accessible in a safe way to less technically savvy users. That genie is kinda out of the bottle, so getting anyone aside from grumpy old guard to use IRC versus the modern alternatives is pretty much impossible. As a result, and aside from the bots doing things like letting me play IdleRPG or whatever, you're more likely to encounter people like me who don't feel like we fit in anywhere or conspiracy theorists, returning to IRC the way Romero's zombies wandered to the shopping mall because they had a vague memory of it from a former life.

[akikoo]

> since it's all being driven by conservative and liberal zealots

Just join Libera's #politics. Full-on leftist politics where another opinion is not allowed

[boredemployee]

funny enough sounds just like my divided family. some subjects are not allowed on both sides

[babycommando]

ZUSE was initially made to go along a CLI I've built for a synthwave radio NightrideFM (https://nightride.fm/), that has a hacker subchannel named Rekt Network (https://rekt.fm/). Both communities are still very active there!

irc.rekt.network:6697 channels: #rekt,#nightride TLS true

Also checkout the Nightride cli at https://github.com/babycommando/nightride-cli

[anthk]

Very slow to play in my N270 netbook, but OFC any other IRC client works fine.

And, well, I'll just open the radio playlist with mocp.

[benreesman]

I hang out on IRC. Its not active like back in the day but a lot of OG legends lurk and a couple of times a day you can help someone switch to Linux if you have time. I have a TODO to get more serious about finding active channels.

[cykros]

IRC? Heck, there's still FIDOnet echos and usenet groups still active if you know where to look.

Just a lot of ghost towns in between them.

[anthk]

You can access FIDO over NNTP at https://syncro.net (news://cvs.synchro.net to get the groups) and Usenet at https://eternal-september.org, with news://eternal-september.org (or snews:// for TLS, secure times) for the same group fetching.

On the ghosts towns, with FIDO/DOVE you get far less posts, but every group has some content. With Usenet, you either have loaded technical groups (and some less tech bound ones such as misc.internet.discuss) plus some niche hobbies (chess, classical music...) except modern PC gaming. The rest, as you said... shadows from better places.

For postmodern bullshiters, hauntology it's never a thing on open services. There's always some people having fun there. Former propietary or web bound services are dead, forgotten and lost. Such as MySpace, Digg, unpatched MSN-AOL-ICQ, the Spanish slashdot clone (Barrapunto), Libertonia (es.comp.os.linux related slashdot clone) and so on.

[thesuitonym]

I haven't been in a while, but tilde.chat used to be pretty good, and it looks like it's still fairly active.

[lmm]

No. Text-first chat is great, but the people who stuck to IRC this long are all sysadmin-luddites or otherwise deeply weird.