What's special about IRC is that it's really easy to set up. If all of the social platforms collapsed, you could set up and use IRC with your group of friends until the next social platform blows up and "everyone" moves to it.
If a partial/regional apocalypse happened, you could set up and run IRC.
On the other hand it's a good thing, people can't just join and scroll down 10 years of chat history.
But you'll also be completely unfindable unless your client is online.
I don't like the discord server model, but it allows the platform to prevent spam more easily and to put the responsibility on server owners.
Searching chat history is also a big plus.
IRC sets a high bar for users to choose a client, create an auth account etc. So obviously many of them are power users, and those users are qualitative.
Discord is just much easier for everybody, and it makes money.
I would say this is another indication of how people who grew up with the internet, and who generally base their "community" and "friends" in corporate digital products, are incapable of pushing back on corporate overreach.
Are you finding it difficult as a young professional to buy a house, keep up with subscriptions, save for retirement? Don't worry, you'll be screwed 10x worse by the time your of retirement age.
The "i've got nothing to hide from constant survielance", "just use chrome" crowd is digging their own financial grave.
Think it's bad now, just wait...
However it was reborn as Libera which is once again doing great. If you don't know the story, Google it. I don't want to drag up the past, it's better forgotten.
I don't think IRC will really die, it will become a more fringey thing though. Probably more than it already is.
And that it worked so well is the point of the article!
IRC is highly resilient because it's simple to set up, the clients and servers are free software and can be endlessly and independently configured to talk to each other, and it's light on resources - both server, client, and bandwidth.
I'm on terrible, legacy satellite internet (ie, not starlink, with 700ms-1.2s round trip times), and IRC is the only chat system that works fine.
But yeah it worked out really well with Libera.
The internet was much better when it was limited to very techy people too. And so is hacker news for that matter.
We have a saying in the Netherlands: "When you lower the barrier the shit flows over it". It's kinda true.
Like Gopher? Still out there and bein' used. Very "fringe" now though.
The whole Gopher idea (fixed links) actually made a bit of a return on old Nokia mobile phones with "WAP" but it never really took off because it sucked so badly. I made some WAP sites at the time but it was pretty terrible. 1-bit black/white images, a very strict layout and protocol. Bleh.
When the WWW came out gopher was pretty much instantly forgotten. And don't forget the whole internet was "fringe" back then.
There seems a genuine loss of mojo amongst those purporting to support freedom of expression across the spectrum.
One does not wish to feel as though there were some "Dark Age" pending, but here we are.
If I could set technical direction in a company we’d use only IRC and email. Maybe mumble.
1) IRC doesn't support any form of message threading. There's some user conventions like "username:" or "@username" to direct a message to a specific person, but there's no way to make a clear distinction between multiple conversations in a channel. (You can make a new channel for the conversation, I guess, but that's even more hostile than usual to other users trying to follow along.)
2) IRC doesn't support messages longer than ~400-500 bytes. There's an internal hard limit of 512 bytes per line in the IRC protocol, and part of that gets silently consumed by fields like the server hostname and channel name. If you try to send a longer message, it's silently truncated. (Your client will probably echo it back as if it all went through, but other users will see it truncated.) Trying to discuss anything longer than a single line of text typically requires users to post it to an online "pastebin" - adding another external tool you need to make IRC work.
3) There's no reliable, standard way to transfer non-text content on IRC. DCC is unreliable, slow, requires one or both users to set up their firewall to allow incoming connections (!), and only transfers files to one user at a time. All of this combines to make IRC incredibly awkward for discussing audiovisual content, like graphical designs or audio/video. Sure, you can upload screenshots or videos to another web site and post links to IRC - but that's yet another external tool you have to bring in.
4) User authentication and authorization in IRC is incredibly crude. The protocol is built around the understanding that users can change their username at any time (!!), with systems like NickServ bolted on after the fact to "protect" names. User permissions are tied to a user's presence in a channel; private channels are implemented with a single shared password. All of this is "good enough" for a lot of social IRC networks, but completely unsuitable for a business setting which demands a higher level of assurance.
A previous rant of mine on IRC's missing features: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40813743
Without a doubt, the modern era is worse than the experience I had in the 2000s. But, it's true that threaded conversations make it easier to collaborate. Email and voice calls used to work fine for that, though.
Meanwhile, I discovered https://thelounge.chat/, and since I have to open too many browser tabs already, what's one more? I'm pretty happy with it. It fills in the missing features of IRC like sending files and images, and being a bouncer.
I have only been able to load a discord "page" or whatever maybe once or twice so I don't know if discord style chat is better or not. IRC I can run on a potato lol
That said, these days a Matrix Synapse instance would be an easier choice.
That said, I think the lack of threading is a huge downside.
To respond to the sibling comment: we had text files on a share that we could actually grep. Far better than the inexact, incomplete search functionality that seems to have become normal these days.
I've never set up IRC before though, so I have no idea if this is actually feasible.
For me, IRC stopped being attractive when Freenode changed owner. They broke it in two months and with no way to migrate nicks between servers, many lost their registered nicks on the channels that moved to other servers, and I had no want to stay on Freenode for the channels that stayed.
Identity is a major problem with IRC. Losing mine cut a core tether for me, it wasn't my space any more.
Currently, I still run my own IRC server for friends, I have syslog channel where bots are idling and msg importand/criticial messages from my infra (semi-centrliazed logging). I see no reason to move away from it.
I think I do lament the abscence of a more aggressive "why not just update IRC to be like Discord?"
WAY easier said than done, and I think Matrix is trying, but I suppose the most frustrating thing is trying to tell the young'ns, hey this has a strong chance of enshittifying
Because one is a protocol and another is a platform. To quote from [0]:
After 30+ years, email is still unencrypted; meanwhile WhatsApp went from unencrypted to full e2ee in a year. People are still trying to standardize sharing a video reliably over IRC; meanwhile, Slack lets you create custom reaction emoji based on your face.
This isn’t a funding issue. If something is truly decentralized, it becomes very difficult to change, and often remains stuck in time. That is a problem for technology, because the rest of the ecosystem is moving very quickly, and if you don’t keep up you will fail. There are entire parallel industries focused on defining and improving methodologies like Agile to try to figure out how to organize enormous groups of people so that they can *move as quickly as possible* because it is so critical.
When the technology itself is more conducive to stasis than movement, that’s a problem. A sure recipe for success has been to take a 90’s protocol that was stuck in time, centralize it, and iterate quickly.
I got into IRC multiple times, but I really have no desire to go back to it. The fact that I have to set up a ZNC bouncer if I want messages to show up on multiple devices kind of feels like, well, something from the 90's.
I feel like Matrix is considerably less annoying, while being federated and relatively easy to set up.
I'm happy enough with IRC dying.
Modern software tries to do too much and as a result often fails to perform its main function.
IRC is pretty much the simplest solution that works. It wont be going anywhere.
I cant remember the last time I saw a reference to an active channel. Or seen it installed on any system.