Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC?
Curious to know if people still use IRC? Why or why not? What do you use it for? I frankly miss IRC from heavily using it in the 90s.
If you run out of "fuel" in game, and you need a Fuel Rat to come rescue you, you do it in IRC. Dispatch talks to you in their IRC channel, other dispatchers are communicating in NOTAM[2] like notation with pilots out 'rescuing' other players.
It's amazing to behold.
[1] https://confluence.fuelrats.com/display/FRKB/Rescue+Standard...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOTAM
Disclosure: Fuel Rat 2010-2013, Retired.
When was the origin of Fuel Rats in the franchise?
Have they existed since the first game was first released in 1984? Or only after IRC came around a few years later?
Very curious about the history of Fuel Rats in the game series, as well the history of technology these used to communicate.
No, these are actual In-Real-Life-People. Maybe parent got their dates a wee bit wrong.
When I started playing Elite:Dangerous (circa release date 2014?) I ran out of fuel in a system I couldn't refuel in (wrong type of sun or something like that)...and so was stuck. The only way out was to self destruct.
After some googling I discovered the Fuel Rats on Reddit and then their IRC channel. So as per their S.O.P. I put out a call for assistance on their IRC channel and within 10-15 mins or so one of their crew appeared in-system and refuelled me. I don't like to abuse the word "awesome", but these folks were awesome. They were like the AA or RAC of the galaxy :)
I've been saved once or twice by fuel rats. The process is fantastic and seeing the dispatchers in action is fascinating. After they refuel you, they give you a little talk and help you avoid running out of fuel again.
Just one of the greatest things I've ever heard of online.
"Right when Elite:Dangerous was coming out, I had just quit a 3-year stint of playing World of Warcraft ... When Frontier decided to add a feature to the July 2015 release, consisting of a refuelling limpet/probe that could be used to transfer fuel to someone who was out, I had a brain-flash and did a posting announcing that I was starting an organization called “The Fuel Rats” who would undertake to rescue people in-game who ran out of fuel. And, The Fuel Rats were an unexpected success ..."
Just like we do today in Webex Teams for example.
I personally never liked the transition to web based chat because IRC was a lot more information dense than any web chat can be.
Being able to paste inline code doesn't sell it for me since there are pastebins you can host on prem easily.
The hardest part of using their (really good) services was having to use IRC. If they'd used Discord, I'd hop into a server effortlessly. Instead, I had to navigate the byzantine vagaries of terrible UX while running out of oxygen. D:
I like how simple IRC is, but I get why so many people have an aversion towards it. In the age of Slack, telling people to install Weechat and connect to a server manually is kind of scary. I largely embrace the transition to something new, but I do have an issue with the open-source world moving to a proprietary platform.
I wish XMPP were more popular, since I think a federated chat system with an open protocol is pretty neat, but sadly I fear that the Slack hype-train might be a bit too far-gone.
I get the feeling you or someone is going to use this to argue how all of this can be achieved on IRC in some way, but it's just too much work. If you're someone who is trying to make open source chatting cool again, please respect opinions like mine regardless of how stupid you think they are. If IRC isnt at least as easy to use as Slack, i'm not using it for the same things.
For what it's worth, I do some things the hard way. I like digging into the nitty gritty. I'm not a different species. The fact that you think I am is the reason you'd never get any middle ground accomplished. Being "outnumbered 99 to 1" not only reveals how you think of yourself as some kind of victim, but also implies that you exist in some strange reality where being in the minority is the 'right' side to be on. Funny, usually it's the opposite.
I just don't get it. Why, why can't we have both? Why is decentralised, open source, configurable, modern and easy impossible to achieve all at once?
Because you don't do it. If anyone who wants a different user experience than IRC chooses to use a proprietary system, then how do you expect that user experience to come about as Free Software?
Ofc you can use IRCCloud Teams, create servers with one click, but also pay for that.
And what other modern features ate you looking for? This is IRC today: https://quasseldroid.info/assets/images/phone.png and emoji reactions, typing notifiers as well as threads are already supported in some clients and being standardized.
The inability to structure text visually is my biggest reason for avoiding IRC.
Is open source and has lots of modern features like support for threading.
If another user asks a question, and you are apathetic or bored of the answers to that question, thats fine. You’re allowed to have different preferences and not obligated to care about others’ preferences.
But I implore you not to respond with an insult to an answerer as if they’d barged in with an unsolicited opinion.
Then you have to pay for a server and you have to admin that.
> or you could use Matrix
Sure. I wish Matrix well, and I hope they one day reach the point where they can beat Slack or Discord on the polish front.
> It feels like dropping IRC entirely is akin to throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
What baby are you throwing out? I appreciate that these services are proprietary but there's so little lockin in practice that I struggle to care. My gang already switched from Axon to Skype to Mumble to Discord, if and when Discord becomes onerous then we'll move again. Perhaps even to IRC. But for the time being, UX matters and IRC's remains extremely poor.
Funny this is the worst possible IRC network to use - so many channels are overly restrictive which leads to a crappy user experience. The usual claim is to "combat spam" but most other networks (OFTC) don't implement these policies and have little to no trouble with spam.
Maybe you have to kill the ghost of your previous connection if it hasn’t times out yet?
If you head into the xorg channel, you will find yourself talking to all the people who were also attending conferences about xorg 5-10 years ago. Those are exactly the people I want to talk to, when I have questions about xorg.
Have you looked into Matrix? It still has a few kinks to work out, but it seems to fit the bill, and the idea of bridging to other protocols (namely IRC and Slack) is an interesting idea for reducing friction.
Though I would disagree with there being no need for reinvention - historically (and AFAIK unchanged) there are several real issues with XMPP [0]. The idea of XMPP appeals to me, but its complexity and UX are costly, whereas Matrix just works well and is easy to use, which hopefully will allow it to spread beyond tech circles.
edit: found this https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/bca2k2/matrix_riot...
The protocol itself, the implementations, and the rest of the Matrix network was unaffected.
Long answer: My colleagues don't want to so I use it mostly for forums. Some programming languages have chat channels and I have heard that for open source dev it is still somewhat common but I suspect it is declining. It's a pity because I think Slack is stupid. Slack does not have the transparency of IRC and frankly the fact that you can share files and use fonts and indents are not selling points for me.
EDIT: Slack is stupid for me. To each their own I guess?
EDIT2: Just to make it clear, judging from other answers a lot of programmers use IRC every day. But not all of my colleagues are programmers. Some fall in the chasm between "data science" and programming and for such people IRC is unfortunately unfamiliar.
Link - https://about.riot.im/
This may be inconvenient for some people, but for me this is a feature.
Easy to stay logged into irc, hard to fix slack's logging problem
- you should register for every channel
- switching the channels is slow & non-intuitive
- tons of sub-channels and collaborations between are painful
Some would consider that a feature, you only see the activity of the channels you've joined (but you can search for others at any time and you can preview messages in them before joining).
switching the channels is slow & non-intuitive
isn't "/join #channel-name" the same way you switch channels in IRC?
best client ever. and use ZNC.
Freenode has channels with people that are very helpful and friendly. Some channels I am frequent and would recommend: #django, #elixir-lang, #kotlin, #android-dev. I also visit (and get help) #mysql and #postgresql.
Actually I wanted to write a blog post to urge people to learn about and visit IRC, but I hope that this HN thread will suffice...
Try IRC and you won't regret it!
Why would you want to do this? For me IRC is mostly synonymous to technichal discussion on freenode. And my quasselcore runs on cheap rented machine in the cloud. So I honestly fail to see the risk with revealing that IPv4 address, even if it is a public one.
I have not measured whether that machine receives more port scanning than any other, because honestly I did not think that any port scanner would work just through a list of IRC users. Even after thinking of it, it sounds unlikely.
Actually, even if you don't have an IRC client you can right now just telnet to irc.freenode.com port 6667 and enter a couple of commands to join a channel and see the discussion: http://protofusion.org/wordpress/2009/08/irc-via-telnet/
The fact that IRC is an open protocol is of course what makes it "non-trending". You can't easily monetize from IRC and you can't hide the data of IRC behind closed gardens. Everything is there in the open.
I've tried various other popular chat options (like Discord and Telegram) and have been really frustrated by some of their limitations -- particularly in regards to logging, where afaik there's no way to get the logs off their servers and on to my own machine for archiving, offline browsing/searching, advanced regex searches, etc. There's also no way to get the logs if you're not logged in, or if you ever lose access to the servers for some reason.
Discoverability on these alternate chat platforms is also really poor. At least on IRC I could always try typing in a channel like #gentoo or #linux or #debian or #ocaml or #scheme or #lisp or #emacs or #vim, etc, and have a pretty good chance of these subject-related channels existing. On Discord and Telegram, I have to find a link to the channel somehow or get invited. Which is great for private channels, but for channels that you want anyone with an interest in the subject to join, it's simply awful.
That said, they do have some advantages, like integrated images, video, and audio.. and if you need those features, then vanilla IRC certainly isn't good enough. But for me, who does 99.9% of my chatting in plain text, those other features are very rarely necessary and IRC suits my needs just fine. Also, with IRC one could at least always post links to external image/video/audio hosting sites, if you wanted to share that sort of media... which, again, is good enough for me most of the time. In fact, things like videos and images poping up all over the place on chat platforms like Telegram and Discord are just annoying most of the time anyway.
In addition, special Twitch IRC clients have spawned, like TC [1] or Chatty [2] that include support for Twitch-specifics like Emotes, notifications and direct linking to the associated video streams.
Anyone interested in C++ and Twitch should checkout a project of good friends of mine https://github.com/Chatterino/chatterino2
A crossplatform chat client for Twitch in QT so no electron BS.
Personally I have also really enjoyed developing chat bots for fun tasks or logging. So IRC is definetely a big part why I love programming so much.
Freenode has been really helpful for me. I've had great conversations on ##aws, #lfs, #tmux, and #hammerspoon in recent weeks.
[0]:
root@eidolon:~# smartctl --all /dev/sda | grep Power_On_Hours | cut -c88-
102567Because when has it ever been patched? You know vulnerabilities in IRC clients do exist. That's why we were always told to not irc with root back in the days of BitchX.
[Edit] - Slightly pedantically, it's the number of hours one of the disks has been powered up
I never saw anyone measure uptime in that way before. But it make a lot more sense than measuring the OS uptime.
The OS has been updated and the box rebooted for kernel updates a number of times over the years.
I primarily use it for giving/getting help on technologies and open-source projects that I'm using.
There are 99 users and 84066 invisible on 32 servers
36 IRC Operators online
16 unknown connection(s)
53438 channels formed
I have 5185 clients and 1 servers
5185 5972 Current local users 5185, max 5972
84165 94773 Current global users 84165, max 94773
Highest connection count: 5973 (5972 clients) (476397 connections received)I know Slack is the new darling for these things, but their WebUI is so inefficient compared my IRC muscle memory. Wee-slack is great for the Slacks I can use it on (but nearly none of the community Slacks have open API slots for it.)
If you think you don't like X, just wait until your company forces you to use Microsoft Y.
- _emacsomancer_'s law
I've used slack for school, and it was pretty useful. I'm using Teams at work, and it seems remarkably less so. I'm not sure if it's because nobody's comfortable using it for anything other than skype meetings, or because it somehow seems less intuitive or well thought out as slack. Probably a bit of both.
One thing that kind of kills me - we use visualstudio.com too for git (incidentally, it's interesting to see a strong tfs team struggling with git - vs/git integration is useful only if you're relative comfortable with git in the first place), and there doesn't seem to be any kind of strong integration between vs.com and ms teams. That's weird. I see my team on teams, I converse with them on teams, I have access to my backlog items on teams (with an azure plugin), but why can't I see my team's board? vs.com's UI takes some getting used to, but at the very least it seems like it should be accessible, with very little additional work, within teams.
Teams feels a lot like a half-baked (maybe 3/4 baked) response to Slack that could really be so much more.
Is Teams the bastard stepchild of Microsoft? I haven't used Teams, but I recall reading a personal account probably 6 years ago about what working on Google+ was like. Every time something integrated to it, it was a mess and dragged the other products down. Word got around and groups actively avoided the Google+ team and were scrambling for justification as to why they shouldn't get integrated.
0 chance I could find the comment now, but it stuck with me all these years.
Teams is replacing Skype for Business.
Teams isn't that terrible.
On my current gig, we use Teams (free for us because of some Action Pack or Office package - and that's fine because it's one less spend for us) and used to use Slack. I've used Slack and HipChat in previous employments as well.
I'll be honest, I don't see much difference between any of them, they all have their UIX minor annoyances and good points.
Ultimately with all these things it's all about good team etiquette and not interrupting your colleague workflow expecting responses within two minutes of pinging someone (we treat it like email, asynchronous, and for non-urgent communication). To be honest, I dislike the immediacy of these tools and usually mute every channel. If something's really that bloody urgent then just pick up the sodding phone :)
God forbid you ever need to be doing two IM conversations at a time, or attend a meeting and carry on a backchannel conversation concurrently.
It's apparently too difficult to do a MDI interface in Electron.
Also we're in our mid 40's to 50's so perhaps there's a generational discipline we have with these toys that the young guns may not have :) Don't get me wrong, I was a complete asshole on the college VAX messaging thing back in my teens :)
I never thought I'd live to see the day where Slack was the most performant of any given alternatives, but I suppose that was short-sighted.
And as everyone knows Google have a lot of chat products!
I’m even in ##latin to learn, you guessed it, the Latin language.
Thanks! Now I have a term for it.
Also I like the barrier to entry IRC has, it keeps the worst of the worst out because you need some technical skill to even get in. That's why most programming language / distro channels on IRC are of better quality than random slacks or discord servers.
These days the network effects just favour old farts and engineers.
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/why-we-love-tech-defense-difficu...
IRC support channels can provide some immediate front-line support and allow you to ask basic questions without being told to go die in a fire.
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rcirc
[2]https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm
It's a fix point of internet chatting. It has just enough, people on it are either ~ok or great, it requires barely nothing.
I may have ran slack once but didn't stay. I used discord to talk to collapse minded groups, and although discord seems a great piece of work (audio chat is neatly done), both the resources required and the structure/format made chatting way less flowing compared to IRC.
IRC is still actively used as a main communication channel internally at Google to coordinate during outages due to its reliable and low-dependency nature (where a Slack equivalent app relies on hundreds of service dependencies). I know for a fact that Google is not the only company, and many others that practice SRE-like roles do the same.
Source: I worked on one of those teams.
I find it pretty confusing that I see posts like "is IRC dead?" or "does anyone still use IRC?" as often as I do. I find IRC is a very active and I'm constantly discovering new corners of it. I'm on about 15 networks and know there are many, many more I haven't explored.
I've seen a lot of people switching to XMPP, then Facebook, then Gitter, then Discord, then Slack, then… At the end, the result is mostly a fragmented community because not everyone is moving to the next trendy protocol, and there is an increasing number of alternatives. Sure, there's some merit in lowering the effort for newcomers, but it doesn't fully outweight its cost, IMHO.
IRC is the only protocol that remains widely used in the (very) long run and doesn't die when it gets out of fashion (see: it's been out of fashion since before fashion protocols were born).
I'm closely following Matrix, though, because of the bridges (especially the IRC bridge, obviously).
Not sure what I'd do without them, it feels like a "real" social network, where we are different people chatting in real time over several days, the simplicity of the protocol forces people to be clear in their words and not use excessive emoji (although, yes, IRC does support emoji)
If anything the decline of other groups running their own IRC has been good for mine, as their groups decide to continue living by becoming a channel on my network- then their members bleed into all of our social groups in addition to their own, obviously it won't last. But for now it feels very natural and organic.
If you want to join we're on irc.darkscience.net/+6697 (SSL) #darkscience
however, I used to use IRC at work, that seems to have been taken over by slack in most companies though.
At home I recently used it to chat with open source developers about a bug. They found the cause, then my son and I fixed it.
Anything that help to break the addiction of putting trade secrets on internet-connected computers is an improvement over slack.
There are various channels for NetHack variants and for the different public servers that offer online play. Most discussions happen on the public server du jour channel, currently this would be #nethack-hardfought.
Lately, there has opened up a connection to the roguelikes Discord server (https://discord.gg/vg9WWf2) with two-way bridges from Discord to IRC and back.
For public instances, you can contact the server about setting up / using WebIRC to handle multiple connections from the same box.
IRC appeals to me by its simplicicy, just like good old plain text email does. It is a great design that has outlived many of the better, more colourful or more modern alternatives, and will continue to do so.
Like everywhere on the internet there is a resident braggart, a few weirdos and a few ever silent lurkers in every channel, but after 20+ years on this medium my mental filters are well honed.
Mostly about second opinions, in depth technical stuff, or when I don't have time to create a question on stack overflow because Google can't always find the lexical context between my Google search and the actual solution.
Chat is also much better than forums when you want to interact. Slack and discord are bloated software, which are centralized. IRC is much more lightweight and simple, and most of the time logs are available. It's more open.
So yea, it's still used. But it's certainly dwindling.
And it’s nice that after a while just by taking a break and checking the conversation out, you’ll start answering people’s questions too. Always nice to help someone out.
Freenode will always have a place in my heart and an open window on my desktop.
One of the members of our core team set up a server and it was smooth sailing after that.
mIRC is an IRC client that has been around for 24 years and makes IRC very easy.
I stopped using IRC about 20 years ago but I got a lot of knowledge out of my time on DALnet and then Undernet.
The ability to collaborate, combine and share information, and respond to contingencies on the fly was impressive.
Back when I was getting to grips with .NET, the #csharp channel was invaluable in getting immediate technical help. They were the ones that introduced me to LINQ, Hangfire, and reverse proxying with nginx. Despite also being an avid Stack Overflow user at the time, #csharp was a far more approachable place, and I'll always be thankful for their support.
Nearly two years ago I picked up Ruby, but sadly the IRC communities around Ruby and Rails seem pretty dead, especially compared to Slack. I'm sure it's mostly lurkers, but I've always preferred to see lively IRC channels, where you could jump in at any point and see technical discussion or just shooting the breeze. Sometimes, I'd just go to a channel to chat about my day, or about the tech scene where I am compared to where others live.
I recently had a handful of friends that wanted to get away from IRC mainly because smart phone interaction is not the best. Since we switched to keybase I feel like we talk less. Also the desktop client doesn't close without using kill command which makes me open it less.
I use IRC just for chatting with friends and strangers on internet. Shout out to the #csharp channel on freenode some great people that regularly answer questions and help people out.
IRC remains one of the best ways to connect with technologists and talk shop.
XMPP is still a mess after all these years; there is no reason you should have to send so much XML just to send an IM or update your presence.
I'm kinda waiting for SMTP to receive the slight adaptations it requires to be a decent IM protocol. As a long time SMTP operator, I think it's pretty darn close (especially looking at the way Gmail and Inbox [RIP] show threads), if SMTP daemons would cache trusted/known well behaved hosts, or batch/stream envelopes, that's prettymuch all that's missing on the server side.
At work most of the coordination between programmers is via IRC--even though we're all in the same room.
So yeah, IRC is still used.
Anecdotally the population of some popular channels on freenode that I frequent has never been higher.
General experience is, the worst inputs come from the IRC interface. Occasionally that is a regular with a long running connection, or a genuine interaction with a normal person, but handwavingly-mostly the IRC side is someone who has clicked on a web IRC gateway, doesn't know what they're looking at, wants a "give me the codes" style answer or just wants to rant, doesn't respond to people when they offer help, and doesn't stick around. Most people who join IRC and stick around, join and ask "oh there's a Discord, how can I get an invite?". The only genuine spam I've seen came from the IRC side, things like religious spam/flood messages. The biggest restrictions on things like inline-code are that the IRC interface can't deal, because it risks getting rate-limited for "flooding" the IRC servers because one bot user is echoing all the chat from every other user. Markdown which works well enough in Slack and Discord is left as Markdown markup and makes examples look broken in most (all?) IRC clients. The slack and Discord can usefully impersonate each other's users with a hint that you're looking at text from a relay, IRC can't so all the text actually comes from a relay bot user which breaks nick highlighting, nake autocomplete, channel connected user lists.
The Slack experience is still user-hostile and indefensibly poor, I yearn for the days when typing some plain text didn't have 5-10 seconds of lag all over the place, but the Discord user experience side is tolerably fine in almost every way, and better in many ways, except the ideology of it being proprietary and closed source and slurping data into the cloud forever.
I leave my IRC bouncer running, and for a while I used it to join other IRC channels. But IRC increasingly felt like that's all anyone does - typical experience of finding a random channel - dozens of users and nothing but join/parts for the past couple of days.
[just wants to rant / hate for Slack - this also includes me, btw]
Often you'll find that if you ask a question and wait long enough for people to notice, that'll spark quite an active conversation.
Idling in IRC was 10x better than slack.
And I have a group of friends who are on a private IRC server and have been for years. We recently considered switching to a "modern" chat platform. Tried Slack, Matrix, Mattermost, Zulip, and a couple others. Decided we still liked the "feel" of IRC best. (I hate all the whitespace and decoration that modern PWAs use.)
Bouncers or IRCCloud solve the offline-delivery problem, and I can live without the other features that newer chat systems provide.
I'm still confused/impressed at how slack took a free service, stuck something similar but not quite as good in a browser, sold subscriptions and got rich doing it.
I have a "the lounge" server running on digital ocean droplet so I can connect easily.
Giving free users accounts to my server if anyone is interested.
Drop me a line.
I use have slack for some group of friends, but I have been less active after they removed the IRC bridge. I try to avoid Discord.
IRC is also used for my core group of friends, some of them I got over when we started University together as I couldn't stand Facebook messenger. A lot of time is also spent on various open-source projects, mainly Arch Linux but also security related channels and misc projects.
Since now some people are using Discord instead, I am not communicating with them. IRC is much better than Slack and Discord and Matrix. (I also think that they should make this Hacker News available with NNTP, too.)
Side note, there's a very nice IRC log service ran by Whitequark [1] - yes, the one of Glasgow fame. The source is available[2], so you can set up your own too.
I hate Slack with a passion. I am on 14+ servers and it's completely impossible to manage, mostly because of memory.
Recently, I've decided to make a chat client (desktop) natively with C++ for Windows, Linux, and OSX that has a smooth layout like the original AIM (very easy to use). Including, with future plans to do audio/video chats and screen sharing including file sharing.
I just hope that within time, I will be able to release something to the world.
I used to run a personal ZNC instance when I still used IRC to socialize, but Discord killed it all, and honestly as stuff got “too big” I even left a lot of the Discord servers as well to escape the nasty annoying drama. Now IRC Cloud makes more sense because it gives me push notifications; I don’t actively sit on IRC much now.
I don't use slack outside of work, but I always have the idea of using weechat more - for irc and/or other protocols.
What many people say IRC "lack" in comparison with Slack (or whatever new-fangled tool of the day is) are its strengths. What I value in IRC: lack of clutter, simplicity, bloat-freeness, open standard, and not least of all, blazing fast, among others.
Sure, IRC has its limitations, and is not suitable in certain scenarios. But is still shines brightly when it comes to distraction-free, text-based communication.
(I'm also hoping the Matrix protocol takes off.)
Obligatory XKCD reference:
https://xkcd.com/1782/ -- Team Chat
It does have its quirks but I'm finding the ability of having e2e-encrypted chat with multiple parties in a way I can move across devices quite useful. It also does support some more modern features like sharing pictures, files, and emojis without major issues.
Didn't bother to find and try a text-based client yet, although matrix does seem to have an IRC gateway (of course): https://matrix.org/docs/projects/as/irc-bridge.html
Only really been on Freenode and a few other smaller networks (since the glory days of EFNet et al were before my time) but since 2008 I've met countless friends, some of which I know in person and I love working on open source projects with small but dedicated communities, which often use IRC.
Now if you excuse me I need to go move my bouncer to another box :)
Also the #postgresql channel is great.
I'm using the weechat client, which I found much easier to use and more polished than irssi.
And while I am sorry to see people reinventing the wheel with all those crazy web-based protocols, I can't help but think it's kind of nice with less people around. :p
What I meant is use an open protocol to which simple applications (or whatever you prefer to use) can be plugged.
Because my company uses Slack I now have to use their stupid UI proprietary implementation.
I'm also annoyed that popular open source projects like Kubernetes moved to Slack because it's "discriminatory" to use IRC apparently.
> While we still use it heavily, IRC is an ongoing source of abuse and harassment for many of our colleagues
Have you tried wee-slack or similar?
EDIT: no, all proprietary
"While no longer using an IRC backend, Slack offers many IRC-like features"...
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> i have a linode box that runs irssi in a tmux session 24/7 and that’s all it’s for.
Make of that what you will.
I used to use gamesurge and enterthegame servers mainly to hang and chat with other gaming buddies. So much has changed since then
Textual https://www.codeux.com/textual/ is a proprietary paid app that seems to be under more active development. I used it for a bit and enjoyed it, but prefer FOSS when possible and switched back to LimeChat when it got updated again.
I'm still Textual on the desktop, though.
It's neat for finding those wonderful little crazy communities that are hiding out in the anonymizing crypto nets (Tor, I2P, LokiNet, ..)
It's the only place left where there are ONLY real terminal junkies and nerds. No normies. I can relax.
There are various tech support channels on freenode (like #debian) and other networks like moznet.
I also enjoy a smallish but active discussion channel which I won't name here for fear of it being HN'd.
I work remote for a great Open Source company. We've got people all around the globe, IRC is the glue that holds everything together.
Some pockets of the company are trying Slack, etc. but IRC is still the backbone.
I lurk and help out the people new to flask. There's new people all the time
i have learned more about python emacs sql and gentoo on irc than anywhere else.
It is normal to be connected to multiple servers at once, and the UI makes it easy to keep track of them.
As the other commenter said, it is much better to think of each server as a channel. A Discord server is typically dedicated to a single topic or organization. My old World of Warcraft guild has a Discord server. On that server, you'll have separate channels for general chat, announcements, and several voice channels for groups.
Several channels for open source projects.
Sadly not for work anymore.
Some of the SAME people were there. Nearly 20 years later.
The people I met in ##frontend were extremely helpful and made them good friends.
I think I just feel at home there.
And two, I feel there should just be a single network. Either that or make it easy to explore other networks. The kids these days are not going to bother understanding or picking and choosing which network to go.
It's got to be super simple.
I use it to talk to friends. We've been at it for decades and see no reason to stop. Old habits.
The number of attendees ranges from about 100 up to 3,500+ (German record, 2005, still holds), including roughly two dozen parties with 1,000 to 2,500 attendees.
On the orga side, we use it daily for internal discussion and notifications. Events from our own LAN party platform's [1] party web sites (accounts, orders, forum posts, etc.), internal forums, GitLab (issues, CI build results), and social media (followers, mentions) are announced there – using a combination of web hooks, RSS, Zapier, and custom tools ([2], [3]).
These days we use IRC in tandem with a self-hosted Mattermost [4] instance, a bot to bridge between both, and the option to connect to Mattermost with an IRC client. A few things like embedded images get lost on the way, though.
On the parties itself, we run a local IRC server. There is a main party channel with auto-join. Organizers are on IRC both for internal collaboration and monitoring (e.g. [5]) as well as user support.
Tournament players are required to be present in the respective IRC channels for the tournaments they participate in.
Events from the local party intranet [1] (news posts, forum posts, tournament updates) are announced on IRC as well.
A modified version of The Lounge [6] is provided as a simple, web-based alternative as part of our intranet for everyone not used to, or too fond of, a "classic" IRC client.
Last but not least, there's #quiz, running the same MoxQuizz [7] version for ages with questions from the mid-2000s.
That said, our guests usually provide multiple locally public TeamSpeak servers for voice communication.
So while we added some more modern tools and services to the mix (for example a Telegram channel for announcements, reminders and other tiny bits of information), and are considering others (for example Discord, but dependence on Internet connectivity and third-party terms are a massive downside for us), both IRC and LAN parties are totally not dead for us.
[1] https://github.com/byceps/byceps [2] https://github.com/homeworkprod/weitersager [3] https://github.com/homeworkprod/gewebehaken [4] https://mattermost.com/ [5] https://github.com/homeworkprod/syslog2irc [6] https://thelounge.chat/ [7] http://moxquizz.de/