What's wild to me is how IRC was the wormhole that essentially got me out of my small hometown, and established everything I've been able to do over the last thirty years. It's scary to think about how much impact something like a chat server could have.<p>My gateway drug was ANSi art, and that whole scene. I made connections when I was 13 to folks who ran the groups, folks 6-10 years old that me, and was offered my first internship in the Bay Area through IRC. I drove across America in a beat up Honda Civic where the muffler fell off halfway there. But that was it: Through a bit of weird gumption and blocks of colored ascii, I was working at a design agency in Silicon Valley. Everything kinda barreled forward from there.<p>I think about this quite a bit: Unevenly distributed opportunity. There are a lot of smart, creative, emotionally intelligent folks stuck for lack of opportunity, and it seems like if you value GDP growth or general societal forward momentum on a whole, then maximizing access to those opportunity footholds should be a first-order priority of society.<p>Anyway, thanks IRC, and the folks who maintained / maintain it.
For me, what killed IRC was the use of Bouncers. Once they became popular, channels would morph from having 20-30 actively-online users at anyone one time to having 200+ 'disconnected' users who weren't really there. So without any sort of 'presence' indicators, there'd be no indication of who was actually online.<p>So the experience went from real-time chat, to something like a feature-less forum, where'd you'd post a question and then wait for hours/days before someone actually replied (if you ever got a reply at all, despite the number of 'listed' users).<p>So channels just became a idling wasteland of ghost users, which is why I think a large majority of casual IRC users jumped ship to other chat platforms.<p>Now, if everyone just accepted that they don't actually <i>need</i> a bouncer, and understand that like a room in real life, that when you are not in the room you are not part of the rooms conversation, IRC would feel much more 'alive' and people would start using it properly again.
I started using IRC when I was 12. I'm 37 now. I owe a lot to IRC. I learned a tonne from some good people, ran several of my own servers which led me to HTTP, FTP and more.<p>I stopped using IRC full time about five years ago when I realised it's basically dead.<p>I also find that whenever I return to it today, it's mostly made up of kids (who missed out on the golden era of IRC) and grumpy, old arse-hats who are angry that their platform is dying out and has been reduced to a very small sub-set of (technical) users.<p>I switched to Discord (here's my server for DevOps: <a href="https://discord.gg/devopslounge" rel="nofollow">https://discord.gg/devopslounge</a>) and Slack, but now I barely use Slack (the client is just garbage.)<p>I'm happy to directed to a good IRC network with some good, well run channels on DevOps, programming, infosec and more. If anyone knows of any such places do let me know, but I'll not get my hopes up.
I remember fall 1995 rather well. A friend I've since long lost track of snuck me into his university's 24x7 student computer rooms at night. Introduced me to the internet. Quite fittingly, a slightly naughty irc chat session with someone ("a woman"? really?) in Canada was my first memory of the mighty internet. Good times.<p>Thank you Raf!<p>Still a happy irc user.
It's crazy, I've been using IRC for practically 30 years. I was using IRC for months before I even checked out The Web because there was nothing on it back then.
I use catgirl for outgoing IRC servers and sic for bitlbee.<p>Catgirl is much simpler than IRSSI but it doesn't support TLS'less connections.<p>On the "Slack has superseded IRC" wrong supposition... IRC was already declining from the AIM/MSN days and then Whatsapp/Telegram nearly killed it.<p>But, as Usenet, it's still widely used on geeky niches. it's the de facto medium for technical questions for programming or computer/networking stuff.
<a href="https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2006" rel="nofollow">https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2006</a><p>Interesting to see how IRC peaked around 2005. The current most popular network, Libera, has a fraction of the users that Quakenet did 17 years ago.
Colloquy link is dead (again), <a href="https://github.com/colloquy/colloquy/releases" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/colloquy/colloquy/releases</a> is probably the most relevant link at this point. A couple of guys keep it limping along when there are breaking OS changes, but it's pretty much in a coma. A pity, since imho it's still the best-looking UI IRC client on any platform.
Not much news at all, really. More of a roundup of popular clients and utilities.<p>I suppose that's a reflection of the state of the IRC ecosystem, which is stagnant and slowly dying. The ircv3 project, while well-intentioned, will never result in the revitalization of IRC.<p>I really like IRC but the ux story is pretty bad by modern standards. Users expect seamless multi device sync, for one. You can achieve a poor facsimile of this with a bnc and a shell account but it's not a great experience.<p>It's little wonder to me that discord and slack have eaten IRC's lunch, sadly.