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from the ancient-but-useful-technology dept.
What is IRC? It stands for internet relay chat, and despite being developed in 1988, it is still a very useful means of low-bandwidth communication, serving hundreds of thousands of users daily across the world. We have created our own IRC Server at irc.sylnt.us, port 6667. Won't you join us?
"Some have asked why we run our own servers instead of using a public one such as freenode.net. We did this to have control of the TOS, copyright, DMCA, and other legal issues. I like freenode (and their TOS) a lot, but we're building a community and we should make our own choices.
Landon, our overlord of IRC, set this up with a lot of help from his team. He also set us up a link-shortener sylnt.us domain for the Twitter account: that rocks! So send him some love if you see him on IRC - he's doing a bang-up job!
Speaking of Twitter, Bender, our IRC bot, posts the headlines to our Twitter account, so feel free to follow us there."
(Score: 1) by Marand on Tuesday February 25 2014, @01:59PM
Compared to the late '90s and early 2000s, it definitely lost momentum. Freenode, by far the largest network currently, is only managing about half the users of Dalnet at its prime. That's not even getting into Undernet and EFnet, which were busier networks most of the time. Where websites used to invite readers to join discussion on IRC via their channel and network of choice, it moved to forum software and things like disqus or Facebook.
I never said it died because, like you said, it's healthier than a lot of other protocols that have all but vanished, but it still lost a lot of people over the years, despite more people than ever on the internet daily.
Personally, I never stopped using IRC, but I watched the trends shift and others move away from it, especially outside of open source dev circles. So, any time I see someone decide to host a network or start a channel to go with their website, especially one that has potential of becoming large, it makes me happy.
I agree about the XMPP sentiment, by the way. XMPP is great, and when Google federated* their server, I enjoyed being able to run my own server and still be able to communicate with less tech-savvy friends that only had to sign up for gmail and got the XMPP support as a freebie. It looked like it was going to be another big player, an open protocol in the style of email, where everyone could cross-communicate. Unfortunately, everybody took it for their own use and turned off federation, though, so now it's just a pre-built walled garden for the likes of Facebook and Google.
* I'm still pissed about them removing federation and pushing toward their Hangouts and G+ bullshit, but that's too far off-topic to get into here.