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tyingq

Freenode: Current global users 49980

Libera: Current global users 32769

Freenode's decline in users over the past month: http://www.hinner.com/ircstat/Socip_F_2.gif

Comparison showing Freenode decline and Libera rise: https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php

Probably won't be long before Freenode is effectively dead.

Edit: Also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27502059 for a projection and more stats.

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https://isfreenodedeadyet.com

Great resource

Services like this have a very large network effect. As the informed users leave, the quality of discussion drops and the remainder of users end up leaving too.

So what’s odd to me is how high freenode’s numbers still are. That’s a lot of people. If all the major FOSS projects have moved on, and with all the bad press, how is it there are still so many people on it? What channels are they on?

Is their death greatly exaggerated?

If you look at the amount of actual chat, it's already far below Libera.

What this means is that probably most of the users left are either bouncers or lurkers that just haven't disconnected yet. However, this is speculation on my part.

It's probably this. I haven't completely migrated my bouncer, either.

And people might not have turned off their autojoins. It's not like lurking in a different server takes any effort.

I suspect a lot of the remaining users are on both networks.

So how long until Freenode starts faking user numbers to look better?

Meanwhile on the freenode.net front page:

> The future for freenode and FOSS communications, indeed, looks bright and exciting. Stay tuned for many great things to come!

That sentence reads like pure cocaine.

It's not as bad as one from their message when they wiped Freenode, which include the line "freenode is freedom." Someone either hasn't read 1984, or deliberately echoed it.

I don't disagree with your point or your numbers, but the first chart can be misleading because the y axis doesn't start at 0.

That low? IRC is truly dead

But then again everyone is on Discord now so no surprise

As a flourishing community of the interwebs maybe, just maybe.

IRC as a tool is certainly not dead.

Former IRCOP.

How does IRC work on mobile these days?

Last time I used IRC seriously, I had to get off the train because I was chatting more on mobile than not and the mobile clients were basically un-serviceable (IIRC, protocol is too chatty and stateful for reliable connection on a device continuously changing its physical network connection).

Mosh+screen+irssi is way more usable in terrible network conditions than any of the more contemporary options

This has value. But I never go anywhere with terrible network conditions, so it has no value to me.

I always used a client called quassel that had an always on server you hosted somewhere. Then you had mobile and desktop apps that you used to connect to it. Because the server portion was always connected you did not miss stuff even when your client was disconnected.

Quassel so far has been working really well on Android connected to my Quassel Core docker container on a vps.

As it always was, the best way to use IRC is sadly to sign up for a third party shell account and run a bnc or an irssi+tmux session or similar.

It's little wonder to me that IRC's lunch got eaten; the UX on mobile is just awful.

irccloud is a third party thing that makes this as seamless as other persistent chats but its not free

Ish. Their mobile experience is notably jankier than discord, but still best in class for IRC.

Like in past days. If you have a working OS (ie not iOS) you can use it fine. Otherwise use Lounge or something similar.

I was using Android and the experience was not good. Disconnects every time I put my phone in my pocket.

You need to disable power savings.

Irccloud is a popular and easy to use client with a good mobile interface.

I use weechat, with the glowing-bear frontend on both desktop and mobile.

In both cases, the mobile interface is a frontend for something else instead of being an actual irc client.

No idea, but Libera's Matrix bridge seems to work really well.

I run a web based bouncer on my cluster and VPN into its interface on mobile devices.

I find The Lounge to be fine for me on desktop and mobile. Also you can leave it connected, potentially eliminating the need for a bouncer.

https://thelounge.chat/

Low probably means higher quality engagement to be honest. Not that I use it but the trend I see is smaller things like this have higher quality conversation and interaction with some direct access to people you wouldn’t normally be able to talk to otherwise. Seems like a feature to me if you do it right and aren’t chasing the VC fly wheel.

IRC is not dead but I was also surprised by those numbers. Random Discord servers for niched things have more users than those combined and the big ones have hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of users.

OTOH: IRC only counts users who are currently online. Discord counts every user who has clicked an invite link and "joined" the server, regardless of whether they are active.

You're right but it all depends on what number you choose to expose (the games I've played that show Discord member count in-game usually show online count). As an example of a niche server I just saw one that is only about trading stuff in Animal Crossing: New Horizons but it still had 100k online with 500k in total.

Any idea of user count on other networks? Is IRCnet still the largest? Are EFnet and QuakeNet still alive?

Edit: the IRC Wikipedia page has numbers from a couple of years ago. IRCnet is twice the size of EFnet and QuakeNet, freenode was three times the size of IRCnet.

You may find this resource useful for current values: https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2021

Completely false.

#postgresql IRC has by far the most insanely helpful and in depth discussions of even the most trickiest of issues.

You can't even bookmark or favorite channels on discord. On discord, instead of joining channels, you join server (which aren't really servers BTW) with all their sub-channels, it is utterly impractical to use.

And you have to use Discord's client, which looks the same in the browser and on the desktop. Among other things you simply cannot watch multiple channels at the same time, even on the same server. You have to switch back and forth between them, and in my experience you give up and stay in one or the other. If they're on different servers, it's even more of a pain.

This is the biggest pain for me with discord. Third party clients have tabs for specific channels u can use but it's still not as easy to monitor multiple places like it is in irc. And also it's against TOS

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