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Comment by non-entity | Hacker News Reader

Ok, so hear me out: I'm a young dumb kid, and I just don't get irc. I'll join a supposedly active irc channel for something I'm working on, do whatever the channel wants as far as registering, etc. Once I'm in, nothing.

No one seems to be chatting about anything, the only messages I see are logging people joining and leaving. One time I left an irc client open for hours and i finally saw some other human asked a question. After that , more nothing, I don't think anyone replied to them. These servers often show 100s or 1000s online too!

Am I doing something wrong, or am I missing something I need to use irc?

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This is my experience on irc today as well. It’s dead.

I used to keep a few channels open at work all day long in 2007. #j2me, #java, #c. The conversation was active with no more than a few minutes of silence at a time. People would say good morning at the start of the day, goodbye at the end, they would talk about their weekend. It was like a virtual break room where you could ask tech questions (except #c was hostile to questions, those guys were weird) and make friendships.

It’s not just less active now. It’s dead every time I look.

This is just over the past couple days: https://i.imgur.com/WUFiL18.png

I wouldn't call it dead at all.

where/how do you connect to these rooms? I would love to hang out in the #linux room

The channels from his screenshot are on Freenode.

thank you!

As the other reply said: Freenode. But I also am on other servers and many other channels.

I run a The Lounge[0] instance on a cheap VPS.

[0] https://thelounge.chat/

It's totally not dead. I've thought for years that IRC is underrated now. I'd much rather participate in an IRC channel than something like, say, Slack. Active channels come and go. Some legacy channels are better than others. Some of them die and people move on to next level, more obscure channels. I just mentioned as an example in a comment above my experience in #python on Freenode which has been overwhelmingly active and positive. You also need to consider when the channel is most active, it's usually gonna be late afternoon and evening in US and European time zones. YMMV.

2007 EfNet #java was an absolutely magical place.

Honestly, I think things started declining when the original jjava bot got wiped :( RIP, jjava.

But yes, IRC channels in those days didn't take kindly to questions from people who didn't bother reading the docs, and imho that was a very good thing. Nobody properly learns by being spoonfed.

> This is my experience on irc today as well. It’s dead.

It's not dead. You're just in the wrong severs.

1. Run a bouncer - this is a program that will log messages and keep you aware of conversation when you aren't actively connected (really the bouncer stays connected and you just connect to it)

2. Most channels have a time of day when they're alive. That may not be when you're in them.

3. Turn off/Suppress the join/leave messages in busy channels. You'll be happier.

For those wanting to check out bouncers, give IRCCloud[0] a try for a (free) hosted bouncer, or look into running your own with ZNC[1].

[0]https://www.irccloud.com/

[1]https://wiki.znc.in/ZNC

znc >

Some channels are just like that. If you have a question, usually you just ask and wait a while until someone gets around to answer it or have a conversation with you about it.
Checking my IRC client since yesterday, there's at least 500 new messages in almost all channels I've joined. Some more popular channels like #linux have constant conversations going.

What server do you use?

A person's server list is like a little black book. They'll likely not share so other people don't pollute it.

Freenode primarily. Plenty of other servers out there for different communities, too.

Some people have amassed a collection of channels throughout the years that were probably pretty active in the past, but aren’t anymore. Some people like me might notice this and remove them from my autojoin list while others won’t care since idling in a channel is a pretty negligible performance hit.

I think that's accurate. People who think "IRC is dead" are probably in the wrong channels and need to invest a little time updating their autojoin list.

That's fairly typical when you join an IRC channel where most people are in a substantially different timezone to you.
If you're in a channel at the same time as other people, it's fairly common for it to be active. Assuming interesting things to talk about. ;)

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