Any idea of user count on other networks? Is IRCnet still the largest? Are EFnet and QuakeNet still alive?
Edit: the IRC Wikipedia page has numbers from a couple of years ago. IRCnet is twice the size of EFnet and QuakeNet, freenode was three times the size of IRCnet.
As an EFnet admin: EFnet ;-) IRCnet is still around too with some very active chat channels (e.g. #worldchat). The networks are much smaller nowadays though.
I guess you're talking about something like Twitch? That's certainly a use case but a rather extreme and rare one. Among public IRC networks I believe QuakeNet has the record with a peak of ~240k users in total on the entire network (that was a long time ago). Channel record on QuakeNet was ~10k users. These days it looks like only two IRC networks have >30k active users in total (according to http://irc.netsplit.de/networks/) - freenode and IRCnet.
I also use a lot of IRC. But it just seems that most of the networks are already rather quiet. Though Freenode, galaxynet and some others, I believe, are still growing?
At least OFTC and Rizon are also still going strong, in addition to Freenode. There are also many private IRC networks which serve smaller communities and have not seen much in the way of stagnation.
I have been using IRC since 2006 and I still use it. Initially, I used to hang out on a variety of networks including Freenode, DALNet, EFNet, OFTC, etc. but as years went by I found myself joining only Freenode. The most active discussions around open source projects, mathematics, programming languages, etc. occurred on Freenode.
After the original Freenode staff stepped down[1] and moved to Libera[2] in May 2021, I moved to Libera too.
There are still tight-knit communities on Libera IRC. For example #commonlisp, #emacs, ##math, #python, etc. have great communities with friendly attitude. I have been an operator of the #algorithms channel[3] for over 14 years now. I run a mathematics and computation book club[4] at #offbeat. Contrary to the popular opinion on this forum that IRC is dead, I think IRC is still thriving. It is definitely not as popular as web-based forums like Twitter, Stack Overflow, etc., not even close, but it is there, it is active, and I think it is here to stay for at least another decade or two and possibly even longer.
The irc chan on freenode is frequently populated with helpful people. The community is still small enough where everything is on the main mailing list.
Freenode's largest competitor is likely OFTC, not IRCNet. IRCNet is a general purpose IRC network, Freenode is more open source and surrounding topics, as is OFTC. OFTC however is more strictly on-topic (off topic channels must be +s, which means they don't show up in channel listings).
Popular GUI-clients would be Colloquy on Mac, mIRC on windows and XChat on linux. Just download one and see for yourself; Freenode is a popular network for hackers of all kinds, QuakeNet is the network for gamers (and also happens to be the biggest with ~60k users online at any given time).
#python and #ubuntu are heavily filled on freenode with over a thousand users though? As well as #debian and #go-nuts (for Go) I think IRC is plenty popular, now if the vast majority idle is another story, people are from all around the globe.
How can I miss it? I'm still on IRC all day every day. There are amazing little communities out there. You can use netsplit.de to find some of them. And of course there are the larger communities that sort of exist like all the people on Freenode that crossover on many channels.
IRC is very much alive and well. It's just that it didn't grow as fast as all the commercial web.
Edit: the IRC Wikipedia page has numbers from a couple of years ago. IRCnet is twice the size of EFnet and QuakeNet, freenode was three times the size of IRCnet.
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