[Vaslo]

Not sure if this question will get removed but a tangent nonetheless - I’d like to use this but I don’t know what to do with it since the advent of Discord. What do people do with IRC now and where do you find content?

I remember being a high school student and having an amazing physics conversation on IRC that included a description of Flatworld that really fascinated me.

[neilv]

> I’d like to use this but I don’t know what to do with it since the advent of Discord. What do people do with IRC now and where do you find content?

IRC is for people to whom the word "content" sounds right out of Idiocracy. :)

I wouldn't go poking around IRC today looking for random passive content consumption. There's more of that pretty much everywhere else on the Internet.

Go to IRC, in a goal-directed way, if an open source project you use is OG enough to have an IRC channel (rather than a open source backsliding Discord) that you want to access.

If you're involved in IT incident response for a company, there is a chance that running a simple private IRC server that's entirely separate from all your other infrastructure is useful. You'll need to make sure ahead of time that everyone who needs to access it urgently, when everything else is blowing up, will be able to.

[Vaslo]

So are you implying I’m some fool out of idiocricy? I don’t get your comment?

[neilv]

It's a very common term now, and no fault of anyone for using it.

But it was introduced in its current sense (not in the protocol sense) by cynical and greedy exploiters, who spoiled much of the goodness of the Internet.

So when a random person casually says something like "consume content", unironically, it's like saying, "it's got what plants crave...".

[mfro]

These are some of the most active channels:

https://netsplit.de/channels/?net=Libera.Chat

There are some other nets listed on that site with somewhat lower usercounts:

https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php

[asnyder]

#freenode was generally the main IRC node I used with all the good dev rooms.

Seems to still be chugging along. You can even join directly via their web-client: https://freenode.net.

Personally I still use pidgin.im to connect to all the relevant #freenode goodness. Seems people forget it still works and is pretty great even all these years later :).

[crtasm]

I forgot Freenode was still running, most projects left for https://libera.chat/

Due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode#Ownership_change_and_...

[asnyder]

Thanks so much for the update. Had no idea. Seems all the main channels moved over. Thanks!

[rw_grim]

Most went to libera, some went to OFTC[1], and a few moved to matrix as well.

[1] https://www.oftc.net/

[crtasm]

Chaos Communication Congress has channels on Hackint network #39c3 #39c3-offtopic (both bridged to Matrix)

https://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2025/39c3-power-cycles

[trevithick]

I had the same question. I briefly joined the Slackware IRC a long, long time ago when I had questions, but now I wouldn't even know what to do with this client.

[culinary-robot]

You find a community that shares the same interest as you and start chatting :)