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Is IRC a tiny fraction of what it was? As a percentage of internet traffic sure, but has the population of IRC users actually declined?

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Well it's being kept alive in the DoD as "tactical chat" [1]. Although the article is from 2015, watchstanders do still use it today.

[1] https://publicintelligence.net/tactical-chat/

I’m pretty sure IRC has continued to grow in obscurity, much like Gopher, which, last I checked, was also at an all-time peak and growing steadily but slowly.

The numbers here https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php are much lower than what I remember from twenty years ago, and the Internet Archive seems to support this: https://web.archive.org/web/20060902133725/http://irc.netspl...

I don't think IRC is one of those technologies whose usage count in absolute terms is at an all-time high today. It wasn't exactly mainstream in the early 2000s, but it still had lots of users.

Thanks, that’s interesting info. I think you might be underestmating this part though:

“Here you see the 100 largest and most popular IRC networks that take part in netsplit.de's comparison, but please consider that there are still some big IRC networks that are out of competition"

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