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Comment by Raphmedia | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else has the issue that every IRC channel seems dead? If I'm very lucky, I'll find an active channel, but it will die in about a month. Perhaps I am simply not looking in the right places.

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There are many large Freenode channels that don't appear to be dying any time soon, like #bash, #archlinux, ##linux, etc. (Though, just because they're large and not dying doesn't mean they're worth hanging out in. :) )

As a tip, on Freenode, you can message the Alis bot to list channels:

    /msg alis list *linux*

The reply from Alis will include how many users are in channels whose names match linux. If it has >500 users, it probably isn't going anywhere any time soon. (You can do this for other topics that interest you, of course.)

It seems that many subreddits also have thriving IRC communities. See: #boardgames on Freenode, which probably has ~150 connected at any given time. So it's not only the big channels!

These days, I only go to IRC when I have a specific purpose in mind. Some online groups [still] use it almost as a support channel. It [the way I use it now] is not like my days in uni when it was a popular form of "casual chat."

I'm still in many casual chat channels. The general topic ones are the best for this, not ones with a strict "Support/Devel for $PROJECT" mentality that shut down offtopic conversation immediately. It's also a matter of finding like minded individuals to chat with, which does seem harder than it was when I was in highschool a decade ago. Of course, I don't spend much time off of Freenode, for all I know, other networks are the equivalent of crossroads chat or an IRC version of /b/!

I'm not on freenode or any of the main IRC servers very often, so I can't comment there, but there's a bit of a resurgence of IRC for me via http://tilde.town, one of the many tilde servers that sprung up after http://tilde.club went viral. The server runs a local IRC instance and there's usually a few of us on there chatting during NA daytime during the week (at least, that's when I'm on, usually).

What's tilde club?

The story of the original Tilde Club is here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8432703

Sadly, I was slightly too late to join the original, but there are now a number of similar clubs with available space. Tilde Town is where I spend my time, and it seems to be a nice, friendly place.

The channel for my local hackerspace is quite active, but not so busy that you can't keep track of what is going on. I also loiter in some bsd channels that are reasonably active as well.

It probably helps to find channels that have a purpose behind them.

Hm, not on Freenode. Small channels are that active but if you go on #linux, #javascript, even #ruby is considerably active...

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