IRC

» go to libera.chat now (it still works)

~ what it is ~

IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat. it is a protocol, not a product. that is why it has not died. there is no company that can decide to shut it down. there are servers, run by volunteers, on networks like libera.chat, IRCnet, EFnet, OFTC, and dozens of smaller ones. you connect with a client. you type /join #channel. you talk to whoever is in the channel.

the protocol was invented by jarkko oikarinen at the university of oulu in finland in 1988. the original use case was replacing a local bulletin board system at his university. by 1991 it was being used worldwide. by 1995 there were hundreds of thousands of users at any given time. it has been here ever since.

~ the years 1998 to 2006 ~

i used IRC heavily from 1998 to about 2006. mIRC was the windows client. xchat (later hexchat) on linux. ircii on the command line if you were a real nerd. there were dozens of clients. they all spoke the same protocol.

the networks were ircnet, efnet, undernet, dalnet, and freenode. each had its own culture. ircnet was european-leaning. efnet was older and meaner. undernet was social. dalnet was full of fan communities. freenode was for open-source projects. you joined channels by typing /join #channelname. you private-messaged people with /msg nick. you set your status with /away message. you pinged the server with /ping.

i made friends on irc that i have not talked to in years and could not name without thinking. but i still know what their nick was. some of them are dead now, in the ordinary human way. some of them are still on irc. you can go find them.

~ how it actually survived ~

three reasons.

no business model to kill. nobody owns IRC. there is no parent company that can be acquired and shut down. the protocol is in the wild. the networks are run by volunteers who pay for the servers themselves or get them donated. when freenode imploded in 2021 because of an ownership dispute, the entire community moved to a new network called libera.chat in about 48 hours. they reimplemented the same channels, the same bots, the same culture. you cannot do that with discord.

the format is right for what it is good at. IRC is good at low-friction text chat between people who already know what they want to talk about. open-source projects use it because the conversation is fast and the logs are public. communities of niche enthusiasts use it because nothing else has the same feel. it is bad at video, bad at attachments, bad at threading, bad at notifications. for most people that means it is not their main chat tool. for a specific kind of person it means it is exactly the right tool for a specific job.

nothing replaced it. discord came close in the 2015 to 2020 window. discord is much better at video and voice and graphics. it is not better at low-friction text chat. it is also a company. discord has shipped features that piss off its users many times. when that happens, some of those users go back to irc. there is a small but real flow of people leaving discord communities and starting irc channels for the same project. this has been going on for years.

~ libera.chat era ~

in may 2021 freenode was effectively taken over by a new owner whose plans were unclear and whose first moves looked hostile to the existing user base. the freenode staff resigned almost en masse, set up a new network called libera.chat, and announced the migration. within a week most of the major open-source projects had moved their channels to libera. the freenode network is still online but it is mostly empty.

this whole thing happened in about ten days. that is the speed at which IRC can rebuild itself. the protocol is so simple, the tools are so portable, and the community is so used to handling exactly this scenario, that the network change felt smooth from the user side. you changed the server in your client config. you joined the same channels. the same people were there. you kept talking.

~ why it still matters ~

IRC is the canonical example of a protocol that survived because it is not a product. nobody could buy it. nobody could shut it down. the people who care about it have kept it running for almost forty years.

this is the model open systems advocates point to when they argue that decentralized chat could survive against commercial messengers. they are correct that IRC has survived. they are also correct that IRC has shrunk every year for the last fifteen. those two truths are not in conflict. survival and growth are different things, and IRC has chosen survival.

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