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I see discord links in a lot of places you would once have seen irc links.

discord has 140 million MAUs. IRC as a whole has probably less than 1 million. Still not a fan of it for free software projects to use proprietary chat solutios as the official place for discussion (maybe inofficial).

The internet has moved to be mobile-first, media-rich, and optionally asynchronous. IRC didn't adapt, though I'm still hopeful for matrix.org.

That's a lot of open sockets for one host

It is indeed a lot, but since Whatsapp manages to get 10 million connections per box [1], 100k seems doable even without insane wizardry. A few years back, I wrote an article on my blog at https://wjwh.eu/posts/2018-10-29-double-hijack.html about keeping 65k connections open in a single Ruby process and that was a hackathon project written in 4 hours.

https://medium.com/codingurukul/whatsapp-engineering-inside-...