it’s extremely good and it has every feature that it needs.

it comes from the era of the internet that developed communication protocols instead of proprietary for-profit software applications running on an electron gui or whatever.

I keep a client running out of habit. All my regular hangs are pretty dead. People left their clients running out of habit. One line per month is a busy month.

A small group of friends have moved to a self-hosted matrix server. That’s more active.

I think there’s just a paradigm change. IRC used to be pretty synchronous. You’d chat while you were connected, and not really multitask and zone out to do other stuff.

Today people expect messaging to be asynchronous. You get your push notifications and deal with it when you have the time.

XDCC > Torrent. Just sayin’.

I miss IRC.

You had to be at least a little smart to connect, and the not-smart or uninformed could be easily identified as connecting from a webirc gateway.
Of course maybe what I miss was just the old Web 1.0- no ‘platforms’, peoples web pages were unique and individual not generic, there was no ‘like comment and subscribe!!’ crap. No algorithms. Discussion was overall more intelligent.

I still do, though it’s a recent development. There’s one community that stopped using Discord for reasons that moved to IRC

I’ve been IRC for nearly 30 years and I still host my own server for the few friends that are also still going there. We were traditionally all going on Undernet but there’s been massive attacks about 15 years ago and we migrated on our own network.

I also host a web client called The Lounge so that we can view and paste images/mp4s/mp3s directly on channels, with previews, push notifications, and logging.

We made the switch from plain text to web clients a few years ago and it really helped to modernize the experience and keep IRC relevant for us. If it was still only text I may have moved to another protocol. At one point I tried installing a Matrix server to replace IRC but found it too complex for simple chat and just stuck with web clients, like The Lounge or Convos.

I use IRC everyday. In particular the #<linux_distro>-chat channel on IRC.

Yes, libera, oftc, and a smaller server hosted on a tildes computer.

I like it better than matrix, but unfortunately people are moving to matrix more. Even though the only good feature that I can tell on Matrix is the ability to edit typos in messages.

I use whatever the support channel for an opensource project is whether it’s irc, matrix or discord. Most often my distro’s irc channel. Apart from that ##music on liberachat is nice. But I never really got into chit-chatting with people on irc.

If you’re running the latest Debian (or even the stable one), IRC is still a good place to go for support. And there is an electronics channel on Libera that was still big last time I checked. If you don’t know which IC to use for your project someone there will probably know. I would stick around there if I were still into electronics.

Also, IRC is just more relaxing by being text-only. No flashy avatars, pictures, reactions, and for most parts no gamification.

#bookz on Undernet. Still going strong for lots of pirated ebooks. I mainly buy on Google Books these days, but sometimes, when the one I want isn’t being sold anymore, I can find it there.

Oh damn, this used to be my main chat protocol back in the day ( started using it in 1997 or so).

I remember how difficult it was to be an op on the channel, similar to how discord is how I guess, or this service that would allow your user to always be connected, but having away status, even when logged off (some service the would run an instance with your user I guess, to which you had to register).

Daily user, works just as well as discord, etc, no middle man (self hosted for many use cases).

And for those people using IRC: which network(s) do you use? I have fuzzy memories of EFnet and DALnet being big, but I’ve been away from IRC for a long time.

Edit: Holy shit, I just logged into a DALnet channel I frequented in the late 90’s and a bunch of the same users are still there! It’s like a time capsule!

Daily by abstraction.

Twitch chat and discord text channels are pretty much IRC in disguise.