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Comment by noamchomsky1 | Hacker News Reader

how many people still use irc? sad, but i would have thought discord would have pretty much killed it off.

We are somewhere over 260,000 [1] and I am not going anywhere at least.

Just in terms of IRC as a protocol there are actually millions of daily users, many live chat features on the Web (like on video streaming websites such as Twitch) use IRC as a basis: https://dev.twitch.tv/docs/chat/irc/

Now for that example it isn't a full IRC implementation, but you can use a common IRC client to connect and chat on such services.

How many of these are bots/bouncers, running on some forgotten vhost?

As many as one would like to substantiate a claim of IRC being "alive" or "dead"? I am fairly certain that the majority of the users I see are alive and real, but how am I even supposed to prove that?

Proving 'aliveness' would be indeed difficult, the more time passes, the harder.

It depends on the network, taking one of the oldest, still existing, EFNET for example, has many bots for technical reasons, so some channel can't be taken over in case of netsplits. The ratio seems like up to a handful of users vs. a dozen bots for the smaller channels. That alone should distort the numbers massively.

For other networks, let's say LiberaChat, it may look different from a technical point of view, but there arises the question of 'philosophical zombiness', as I've witnessed the same shitheadedness repeating the same nonsense over periods of years, when I made the mistake to go there again. That could be bots, now even more so, or just philosophical zombies. Or some so called neurodiversity in action, which I couldn't care less about.

Does it matter? Probably not. It could be seen as a failure of my Zen, messing up my own solipsistic creation ;)

i am annoyed whenever i learn that a popular open source project's (only) real time communication/support channel is on one of the closed platforms; i then chose to not use it.

i've not encountered projects (relevant to me at least) which moved from IRC to closed platforms, some moved to matrix though (which is only mildly annoying to me).

Also with the network adoption [0] of ircv3 features like history playback, the need for bouncers on always-on 24/7 machines should decrease

[0]: https://ircv3.net/support/networks

personally I think discord is shit - I wish it would go away. IRC is a lot more resilient towards takeovers and enshittification. look at what happened to slack.

What happened to Slack, if you don't mind me asking?

It started locking off basic features behind paywalls and is nagging you about it. Before the rise of discord and in the professional space teams it also started to close off external API gateways to for instance IRC.

Its the basic enshitification playbook really. They got steamrolled during COVID by zoom and later teams somewhat interrupting the process.

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