5 ms·

Funny that they mention freenode because it did burn to the ground 2 years after this article. However it was reborn as Libera which is once again doing great.

Funny that they mention freenode because it did burn to the ground 2 years after this article. 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.

mattl 2y ago
Sadly the number of people on IRC took a huge hit the last few years especially channels previously on Freenode.
HamedEmine 2y ago
Agreed, waves from DALnet!
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  Rizon checking in.
abstractbeliefs 2y ago
It's not so funny, because this article was written at the time freenode was burning to the ground, and the article suggests that it would be very easy for everyone to move to libera if it turned out to be the better option. 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.
- RiverCrochet 2y ago
  IRC is so lightweight that a single-core sub 500MHz system can host 10,000 or more connections, and did back in the day.
  - FireBeyond 2y ago
    Hah, the general issue with IRC was (even without DDoS) the bandwidth. I went to Monash University in Australia, starting in 1994. We had an EFnet server (biggest, or one of the biggest). I was just a student so I don't know the specifics, but it was only allowed to run from 6pm to 6am because otherwise it used most of the University's bandwidth, if not the entire country: At the time, Australia's internet capacity overseas was a SINGLE 1.5Mbit link. Telstra did buy a 45Mbit link in late 1995, and then another in early 1996. Still, that's insane, the country had less than 100Mbps. I remember working for a web design company in the mid-late 90s and we had servers at a datacenter in Melbourne. I remember downloading Netscape Navigator (1.1n!) and being blown away by how fast it downloaded, and then realizing for the duration of the download I was using something in the order of 5% of the country's international bandwidth. Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Australia
    - grogenaut 2y ago
      In the fall of 96 or 97? I was getting some freshmen setup with computers. I was on the football team so we were on campus (WUSTL) 7 days before school started so almost no one was on campus. We were trying to download navigator from tucows (I think) and I remembered wuarchive still existed and was on campus. We had 100 meg in the buildings and fiber backbone. We pulled NN at 5.5Mb/s... it finished so fast we downloaded it a second time to make sure. And I said "We won't see speeds like that for 7-10 years." I was pretty correct. That's when I realized that live video would be doable but not for a while.
    - Dalewyn 2y ago
      >Still, that's insane, the country had less than 100Mbps. It's easy to take for granted just how much Fucking God Damn Technology we have mundane access to today. That 14700K or 7800X3D CPU? That's more powerful than entire national supercomputers back in the day. A 64 gigabyte stick of DDR5 RAM? Bill Gates once said 640 kilobytes is enough for everyone. And you probably needed multiple sticks. A 20TB hard drive? With helium? Do you understand the bandwidth of a station wagon full of hard drives barreling down the freeway in the 1980s?! Wait, nobody probably even knows what a station wagon is anymore... 1gbit/s internet? 10gbit/s ethernet? We sung the melody of dial up modems conducting international diplomacy better than any politicians. 360Hz liquid crystal display monitor with billions of colors and millions of pixels? We used to completely evacuate air out of glass or ceramic tubes and fire fucking lasers with them to show monotone pictures in neon orange or green. Modern, minimalist user interfaces? To hell with them, Windows 95 was the pinnacle of human engineered interface design. ...Wait, did we actually devolve? Maybe it was a mistake to make sand think after all.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Oops, when I saw how old the article was I just skimmed it. But yeah it worked out really well with Libera.
Loughla 2y ago
I would argue that IRC absolutely is already super fringe. People have memories of it, but I'm betting active use of IRC today is limited to very tech people.
- gunapologist99 2y ago
  But it was already kinda fringe, even back in the late 90's. People would talk on AIM or AOL chat, but it was rarer to find IRC users among the hoi polloi.
  - jayflux 2y ago
    IRC was home to a lot of gaming communities, it was basically Discord before that existed. There used to be live commentary in channels (Twitch replaced this). I don’t believe any gamers use it today but fringe-tech communities still use it, I think that’s what the parent is referring to.
    - RF_Savage 2y ago
      Does the Twitch IRC side still work? As their chat is based on IRC. I did participate on a few streams chat with a normal IRC client a few years back. Ah, Xircon, Quakenet and Counter-Strike. Those were the days.
      - ekimekim 2y ago
        Yes, their chat is still compatible with IRC, albeit with lots of extensions (which you can opt into using IRCv3 capabilitiy negotiation). More recently they've been adding UI elements on the main site that are web API powered instead of chat though (eg. polls, sending bits).
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    True but in the early 90s there was nothing else yet. But back then the whole internet was totally fringe of course. Still, MIRC (as a client) was a common thing for all computer geeks until 2005-2010 or so in my circles. After that people started moving to whatsapp and the like. This includes people in the hacker/maker and game/lanparty community so very techy and niche but there it was still big back then.
Meekro 2y ago
IRC feels more fringe, but it's actually held up surprisingly well. According to the stats, it's currently about half as popular as it was in 2000 when I started[1]. That's better than I would have guessed. [1] https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2024 https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2024
- LinuxBender 2y ago
  It's probably worth adding that IRC is so simple to stand up and requires such tiny resources there could be many independent small IRCD's running for smaller organizations and we would never know. I can't be the only one that got tired of drama from some circles of people and stood up my own semi-private nodes for a few circles of my friends. NGIRCD can be configured in less than 5 minutes counting obtaining a LetsEncrypt certificate. Services can take a few more minutes. UnrealIRCD is more feature rich but takes a little longer to configure optimally. I've personally taught many people how to set up NGIRCD. I have no idea how many of them kept one running. Slap a web front-end on it [1] and the bar to access is significantly lowered. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41201487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41201487
  - Meekro 2y ago
    ngIRCd looks good! To be honest, these days I'm surprised that ChanServ/NickServ type stuff isn't integrated directly into the IRCd. I guess it gets complicated if you have multiple servers and they have to decide who controls services, but would simplify single-server arrangements.
    - LinuxBender 2y ago
      Part of IRCv3's roadmap [1] is to implement integrated services. Ergo apparently has done it never tested it and Unreal has apparently developed an addon which I was unaware of. I too would like to see more services integrated into the IRC daemon. [1] - https://ircv3.net/software/servers.html https://ircv3.net/software/servers.html
paxys 2y ago
How is it "funny" when the Freenode saga is literally what this article is about?
blooalien 2y ago
> "I don't think IRC will really die, it will become a more fringey thing though. Probably more than it already is." Like Gopher? Still out there and bein' used. Very "fringe" now though.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Gopher was already fringe in 1991 tbh. If you'd even find a gopher server it'd be already outdated in terms of info. And it makes sense. Hyperlinking was just a really really good idea, much better than a list of fixed links in a document. 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.

mattl 2y ago

Sadly the number of people on IRC took a huge hit the last few years especially channels previously on Freenode.

HamedEmine 2y ago

Agreed, waves from DALnet!

Dalewyn 2y ago
Rizon checking in.

abstractbeliefs 2y ago

It's not so funny, because this article was written at the time freenode was burning to the ground, and the article suggests that it would be very easy for everyone to move to libera if it turned out to be the better option. 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.

RiverCrochet 2y ago
IRC is so lightweight that a single-core sub 500MHz system can host 10,000 or more connections, and did back in the day.
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  Hah, the general issue with IRC was (even without DDoS) the bandwidth. I went to Monash University in Australia, starting in 1994. We had an EFnet server (biggest, or one of the biggest). I was just a student so I don't know the specifics, but it was only allowed to run from 6pm to 6am because otherwise it used most of the University's bandwidth, if not the entire country: At the time, Australia's internet capacity overseas was a SINGLE 1.5Mbit link. Telstra did buy a 45Mbit link in late 1995, and then another in early 1996. Still, that's insane, the country had less than 100Mbps. I remember working for a web design company in the mid-late 90s and we had servers at a datacenter in Melbourne. I remember downloading Netscape Navigator (1.1n!) and being blown away by how fast it downloaded, and then realizing for the duration of the download I was using something in the order of 5% of the country's international bandwidth. Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Australia
  - grogenaut 2y ago
    In the fall of 96 or 97? I was getting some freshmen setup with computers. I was on the football team so we were on campus (WUSTL) 7 days before school started so almost no one was on campus. We were trying to download navigator from tucows (I think) and I remembered wuarchive still existed and was on campus. We had 100 meg in the buildings and fiber backbone. We pulled NN at 5.5Mb/s... it finished so fast we downloaded it a second time to make sure. And I said "We won't see speeds like that for 7-10 years." I was pretty correct. That's when I realized that live video would be doable but not for a while.
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    >Still, that's insane, the country had less than 100Mbps. It's easy to take for granted just how much Fucking God Damn Technology we have mundane access to today. That 14700K or 7800X3D CPU? That's more powerful than entire national supercomputers back in the day. A 64 gigabyte stick of DDR5 RAM? Bill Gates once said 640 kilobytes is enough for everyone. And you probably needed multiple sticks. A 20TB hard drive? With helium? Do you understand the bandwidth of a station wagon full of hard drives barreling down the freeway in the 1980s?! Wait, nobody probably even knows what a station wagon is anymore... 1gbit/s internet? 10gbit/s ethernet? We sung the melody of dial up modems conducting international diplomacy better than any politicians. 360Hz liquid crystal display monitor with billions of colors and millions of pixels? We used to completely evacuate air out of glass or ceramic tubes and fire fucking lasers with them to show monotone pictures in neon orange or green. Modern, minimalist user interfaces? To hell with them, Windows 95 was the pinnacle of human engineered interface design. ...Wait, did we actually devolve? Maybe it was a mistake to make sand think after all.
wkat4242 2y ago
Oops, when I saw how old the article was I just skimmed it. But yeah it worked out really well with Libera.

Loughla 2y ago

I would argue that IRC absolutely is already super fringe. People have memories of it, but I'm betting active use of IRC today is limited to very tech people.

gunapologist99 2y ago
But it was already kinda fringe, even back in the late 90's. People would talk on AIM or AOL chat, but it was rarer to find IRC users among the hoi polloi.
- jayflux 2y ago
  IRC was home to a lot of gaming communities, it was basically Discord before that existed. There used to be live commentary in channels (Twitch replaced this). I don’t believe any gamers use it today but fringe-tech communities still use it, I think that’s what the parent is referring to.
  - RF_Savage 2y ago
    Does the Twitch IRC side still work? As their chat is based on IRC. I did participate on a few streams chat with a normal IRC client a few years back. Ah, Xircon, Quakenet and Counter-Strike. Those were the days.
    - ekimekim 2y ago
      Yes, their chat is still compatible with IRC, albeit with lots of extensions (which you can opt into using IRCv3 capabilitiy negotiation). More recently they've been adding UI elements on the main site that are web API powered instead of chat though (eg. polls, sending bits).
- wkat4242 2y ago
  True but in the early 90s there was nothing else yet. But back then the whole internet was totally fringe of course. Still, MIRC (as a client) was a common thing for all computer geeks until 2005-2010 or so in my circles. After that people started moving to whatsapp and the like. This includes people in the hacker/maker and game/lanparty community so very techy and niche but there it was still big back then.

Meekro 2y ago

IRC feels more fringe, but it's actually held up surprisingly well. According to the stats, it's currently about half as popular as it was in 2000 when I started[1]. That's better than I would have guessed. [1] https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2024 https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2024

LinuxBender 2y ago
It's probably worth adding that IRC is so simple to stand up and requires such tiny resources there could be many independent small IRCD's running for smaller organizations and we would never know. I can't be the only one that got tired of drama from some circles of people and stood up my own semi-private nodes for a few circles of my friends. NGIRCD can be configured in less than 5 minutes counting obtaining a LetsEncrypt certificate. Services can take a few more minutes. UnrealIRCD is more feature rich but takes a little longer to configure optimally. I've personally taught many people how to set up NGIRCD. I have no idea how many of them kept one running. Slap a web front-end on it [1] and the bar to access is significantly lowered. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41201487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41201487
- Meekro 2y ago
  ngIRCd looks good! To be honest, these days I'm surprised that ChanServ/NickServ type stuff isn't integrated directly into the IRCd. I guess it gets complicated if you have multiple servers and they have to decide who controls services, but would simplify single-server arrangements.
  - LinuxBender 2y ago
    Part of IRCv3's roadmap [1] is to implement integrated services. Ergo apparently has done it never tested it and Unreal has apparently developed an addon which I was unaware of. I too would like to see more services integrated into the IRC daemon. [1] - https://ircv3.net/software/servers.html https://ircv3.net/software/servers.html

paxys 2y ago

How is it "funny" when the Freenode saga is literally what this article is about?

blooalien 2y ago

> "I don't think IRC will really die, it will become a more fringey thing though. Probably more than it already is." Like Gopher? Still out there and bein' used. Very "fringe" now though.

wkat4242 2y ago
Gopher was already fringe in 1991 tbh. If you'd even find a gopher server it'd be already outdated in terms of info. And it makes sense. Hyperlinking was just a really really good idea, much better than a list of fixed links in a document. 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.