Freenode is still very much alive these days. Lots of people want to use discord (or any other mainstream commercial chat service) for their programming commun

Freenode is still very much alive these days. Lots of people want to use discord (or any other mainstream commercial chat service) for their programming communities. The problem with that are the enormous masses of people that use discord for everything else and when they want to learn programming its a lot easy to pop by in the discord server and ask why their code doesn't work. It's different with IRC, because setting it up and learning its ways is not completely trivial. It's about 2 google searches away, just like the fix for that simple compile error that needs fixing. Those that are patient enough for that are usually the ones patient enough to fix their syntax errors themselves. And when you think about it - being patient and able to fix your errors for yourself is exactly the prerequisite a beginner needs for their attempt to learn how to program. This, and the fact that a lot of hardcore FLOSS contributors refuse to use proprietary platforms for development of their software makes Freenode a very nice place to discuss programming.