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.
Daily by abstraction.
Twitch chat and discord text channels are pretty much IRC in disguise.
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!
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.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.
https://xkcd.com/1782 for some
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.
Seems like what you want is matrix
Too bad about the insane schema.
Sorry, what do you mean by schema?
The database schema that sets each room as the atomic unit. That ends up creating a very convoluted database structure prone to corruption.
Matrix but with stronger community engagement, yes.






