I’ve noticed some blog posts mentioning IRC communities. I personally haven’t used IRC in ages and I’m curious about who is still using it and why. Examples welcome.

  • SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today
    2·
    2 hours ago

    I miss IRC.

    You had to be at least a little smart to connect, and the not-smart or uninformed could be easily identified as connecting from a webirc gateway.
    Of course maybe what I miss was just the old Web 1.0- no ‘platforms’, peoples web pages were unique and individual not generic, there was no ‘like comment and subscribe!!’ crap. No algorithms. Discussion was overall more intelligent.

  • KristellA
    3·
    4 hours ago

    I still do, though it’s a recent development. There’s one community that stopped using Discord for reasons that moved to IRC

  • nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    5·
    7 hours ago

    it’s extremely good and it has every feature that it needs.

    it comes from the era of the internet that developed communication protocols instead of proprietary for-profit software applications running on an electron gui or whatever.

    • toynbee@lemmy.world
      2·
      3 hours ago

      Every popular chat client since IRC has been IRC plus whatever feature was seen as needed.

      I’m old enough that I met my wife on IRC. A younger coworker of mine once said of modern chat “you can only reskin Slack so many ways.” He was right but got one word wrong.

  • sem@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    1·
    4 hours ago

    Yes, libera, oftc, and a smaller server hosted on a tildes computer.

    I like it better than matrix, but unfortunately people are moving to matrix more. Even though the only good feature that I can tell on Matrix is the ability to edit typos in messages.

  • gera@feddit.nuEnglish
    1·
    5 hours ago

    I use whatever the support channel for an opensource project is whether it’s irc, matrix or discord. Most often my distro’s irc channel. Apart from that ##music on liberachat is nice. But I never really got into chit-chatting with people on irc.

  • PetteriPano@lemmy.world
    13·
    1 day ago

    I keep a client running out of habit. All my regular hangs are pretty dead. People left their clients running out of habit. One line per month is a busy month.

    A small group of friends have moved to a self-hosted matrix server. That’s more active.

    I think there’s just a paradigm change. IRC used to be pretty synchronous. You’d chat while you were connected, and not really multitask and zone out to do other stuff.

    Today people expect messaging to be asynchronous. You get your push notifications and deal with it when you have the time.

  • kersploosh@sh.itjust.works
    27·
    1 day ago

    And for those people using IRC: which network(s) do you use? I have fuzzy memories of EFnet and DALnet being big, but I’ve been away from IRC for a long time.

    Edit: Holy shit, I just logged into a DALnet channel I frequented in the late 90’s and a bunch of the same users are still there! It’s like a time capsule!

  • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
    251·
    2 days ago

    Daily by abstraction.

    Twitch chat and discord text channels are pretty much IRC in disguise.

    • nomy@lemmy.zipEnglish
      11·
      1 day ago

      IRC is an open source protocol, there are dozens of clients and entire networks of bots built on top of it.

      Twitch and Discord are walled gardens that are but a shadow of what IRC is.

  • Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org
    23·
    2 days ago

    It’s the predecessor of discord etc. So if you are old enough and nerdy enough… I am only old enough ;-)

    (In even earlier times, there was “finger” for personal status messages - googel it if you don’t know it)

  • pedz@lemmy.ca
    7·
    1 day ago

    I’ve been IRC for nearly 30 years and I still host my own server for the few friends that are also still going there. We were traditionally all going on Undernet but there’s been massive attacks about 15 years ago and we migrated on our own network.

    I also host a web client called The Lounge so that we can view and paste images/mp4s/mp3s directly on channels, with previews, push notifications, and logging.

    We made the switch from plain text to web clients a few years ago and it really helped to modernize the experience and keep IRC relevant for us. If it was still only text I may have moved to another protocol. At one point I tried installing a Matrix server to replace IRC but found it too complex for simple chat and just stuck with web clients, like The Lounge or Convos.

  • Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org
    7·
    2 days ago

    I use it occasionally. The problem is, most of my communities are on Discord. Plus, rooms not being permanent on the server means that bots have to be hosted by someone, plus there’s a severe lack of effective logging.

    Basically, all the problems that later chat programs solve, I keep missing on IRC. I want persistent rooms. I want federation & bridging between servers. I need trustworthy remote logs. Since I know a lot of that has been handled client-side, I don’t understand why it can’t be implemented server-side with IRCv4 or whatever is next.