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Comment by zja | Hacker News Reader

Answer to the second question is that no one uses IRC.

The trend of using discord over forums does suck though, it’s really hard to search old discussions.

Another option is a community hosted Mattermost (it's like Discord/Slack/IRC). It's pretty easy to run, all the chat are in PostgreSQL so it's "easy" to produce archive logs (like IRC has). Or do any other magic.

IRC <3 Still daily driving it with some friends. I wouldn’t be surprised if my Discord chat history was unavailable in a decade, so IRC is a nice option to run on the side. There’s value in simplicity, and I admit the risk of sounding like a tech hipster.

IRC has no chat history either, right. I get the simplicity of IRC but searchable history is a bonus for Discord. As long as the service is available, searching is kinda possible. With irc you have to find out which bot provides history, which is then usually split over multiple files

My client dies the logging, and I can e.g. grep decade old logs. I’m not sure if you can get same level of access to Discord logs (=export them). I guess Discord bot that logs everything as a historian is a partial solution (I guess log bot cannot catch DMs).

> "Answer to the second question is that no one uses IRC."

I agree! I am a nobody and forever will be a proud nobody!

The target audience for web-based linux vm is much more likely to use IRC

IRC still has 270k users in 2024 via https://netsplit.de/

It's not like it used to be in the 90s but that's still something.

How many of those are bots. 270k is basically no one. IRC is dead

Discord has around 200 million monthly active users. At least according to one albeit dubious source: https://backlinko.com/discord-users#discord-monthly-active-u...

Seems reasonable to go with the growing platform with 1000x more users.

I use IRC.. Discord is fine, I just prefer to have both.

What are some good places for a technical / programming hangouts on IRC? Can you point me at some materials please?

https://libera.chat/

A channel listing will give you _many_ results.

I remember back in the day I wouldn't even check the listings, just joining whatever #topic or #hobby or #software and finding it filled with people almost always.

Also see https://oftc.net/, where a bunch of older-school development projects hang out. (That's where the Xen Project moved to after freenode imploded, before eventually switching to Matrix.)

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