IRC is a long way down from its peak both in share of attention and relevance, but yes, probably still more alive than Usenet, although that still also has many pockets of activity.
IRC has quite a few active users which is not what I'd call "dead". It's true that it's not as ubiquitous as it used to be, but it certainly still fills a certain niche.
Even though it's still very much alive and kicking... I wonder what medium has taken over IRC's popularity and on what merits? At least it hasn't grown at all, despite how much general internet usage has grown during the past 10 years.
I spend a lot of time on IRC, including in some of the chats for some of the largest OSS projects. I even still run my own social channel and maintain a bouncer for myself and friends!
Pockets of activity don't mean that IRC as a whole isn't dead, the same way that the Pope doesn't make Latin a living language.
Yes, IRC is still alive (mainly Freenode), albeit on life support, lol. As for other services, the problem is that it's become (or becoming) scattered (Slack, Riot, etc). AOL as much as ridiculous it was, it was fun, because pretty much everyone was gathered in one place.
I’m pretty sure IRC has continued to grow in obscurity, much like Gopher, which, last I checked, was also at an all-time peak and growing steadily but slowly.
I don't know where you went, but there are still plenty of people using IRC. Not as many as were in the past, but it's still popular enough with the crowd of people I hang around.
IRC is not dead but I was also surprised by those numbers. Random Discord servers for niched things have more users than those combined and the big ones have hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of users.
I don't, because I'm still using it! Me and a few internet friends have a cozy little community, and usually hang out there daily. IRC isn't really dead at all as far as I'm concerned, just not as popular anymore. It's the same as with people who complain that there's no good music anymore, it's there, they just haven't found it.
It's totally not dead. I've thought for years that IRC is underrated now. I'd much rather participate in an IRC channel than something like, say, Slack. Active channels come and go. Some legacy channels are better than others. Some of them die and people move on to next level, more obscure channels. I just mentioned as an example in a comment above my experience in #python on Freenode which has been overwhelmingly active and positive. You also need to consider when the channel is most active, it's usually gonna be late afternoon and evening in US and European time zones. YMMV.
IRC is still alive and kicking. I have been using it for around 10 years. I still use it everyday, along with a handful of my "real life" friends. I feel IRC has always been a slightly more "underground/nerdy" technology and will always remain under the surface of other mainstream user technologies such as FB and Twitter.
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