https://hackaday.com/2025/09/08/a-love-letter-to-internet-relay-chat/
Although kids these days tend to hang out on so-called “Social Media”, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was first, by decades. IRC is a real-time communication technology that allows people to socialize online in both chat rooms and private chat sessions. As a decentralized communication protocol, anyone can set up an IRC server and connect multiple servers into networks, with the source code for these servers readily available ever since its inception by a student, and IRC clients are correspondingly very easy to write. In a recent video [The Serial Port] channel dedicates a video to IRC and why all of this makes it into such a great piece of technology, not to mention a great part of recent history.
Because of the straightforward protocol, IRC will happily work on even a Commodore 64, while also enabling all kinds of special services (‘bots’) to be implemented. Even better, the very personal nature of individual IRC networks and channels on them provides an environment where people can be anonymous and yet know each other, somewhat like hanging out at a local hackerspace or pub, depending on the channel. In these channels, people can share information, help each other with technical questions, or just goof off.
In this time of Discord, WhatsApp, and other Big Corp-regulated proprietary real-time communication services, it’s nice to pop back on IRC and to be reminded, as it’s put in the video, of a time when the Internet was a place to escape to, not escape from. Although IRC isn’t as popular as it was around 2000, it’s still alive and kicking. We think it will be around until the end days.
obligatory pointing out that anonymous and pseudonymous are not the same thing 🙂
‘That would be an ecumenical matter’ – Father Jack
“Yes!”
The trouble is you have to use whatever everyone you want to interact with is using. I have to have a phone capable of installing whatsapp because the rest of my family use whatsapp. 🙄😮💨
kind of hit or miss, and i have never tried to use whatsapp…but a lot of times i can find like a bitlbee plugin to paper over things like that. so i use irssi bitlbee client but the remote user is using jabber or discord. a partial fix at best but in practice it’s pretty convenient for me 🙂
I never setup a google account on my android phone,
if I can’t sideload it, I don’t use it
anyone who doesn’t join my private xmpp server
I cut off all contacts with them
You must be a lonely person…
You don’t have to have a phone capable of whatever… Just call them up if that important. The idea you ‘have to have’ is really a want or a ‘addiction’…. Not a need. We’ve been facebook free, etc. for years now and it is great.
yeah don’t ever call me.
ever.
if it’s not life or deaths DO NOT CALL ME.
I don’t care if you ‘cant type right now because you’re driving’ or ‘it’s long so I thought I’d better call instead’. make the minimal effort to put your thoughts together in a short text message or Don’t contact me at all
agreed. I am the worst choice for ’emergency contact’. anyway, phone is veritably useless with all the spam callers such that I now have no ringtone.
Kind of – it largely depends on what services you use. IRC can interact with the majority of them, including discord, facebook, twitter, and your Whatsapp… You just have to use a BitlBee IRC server and it transforms your IRC session into an instant message powerhouse.
until the billion dollar company decides you’re abusing their API. WhatsApp doesn’t have a documented public API, and Discord’s is for bots, not for regular users to use as alternative apps.
you talk to the API the wrong way and your account is terminated with no recourse for “violation of TOS”
Although kids these days tend to hang out on so-called “Social Media”, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was first, by decades.
Wait, wasn’t CompuServe’s CB-Simulator available years earlier?
IRC is from 1988, CB-Simulator from 1980?
There were BBSes even earlier than that.
CS had international users, though. And it sort of was like a big BBS, too.
But yes, there had been various mailbox systems before (BBSes).
The once popular BBS network Fidonet started in 1984, for example.
The German MausNet over here started in 1985, I think.
In early 90s, there had been avid mailbox users who were very up-to-date about ISDN and newest modem technology,
but had no idea what this “internet” was.
Similarily, there had been Packet-Radio users on CB and ham bands
who had uploaded/downloaded files, chatted etc. on a daily basis without ever using/knowing the internet.
In early 90s, the internet still wasn’t the measure of everything.
Other networks and technologies still had existed.
Even graphical mailbox systems with icons that looked more sophisticated that the www.
Unfortunately, these things are perhaps alien to a generation who grew up with the internet.
It might be surprising that information was accessible before the internet/www.
For example:
– international news via news agencies on shortwave (RTTY, a humble VIC-20 or C64 could decode it)
– shortwave newspapers with pictures (sent as weather fax)
– information via Teletext services on TV
– various online services (Genie, Quantum Link, Minitel etc)
– information access via public libraries, kids had their own lexica books in shelf at home
– X.25 networks that were interconected via telephone network (you could dial into new York Library from Canada or Europe, similar to telnet)
– chatting around the globe via Packet-Radio/RTTY, also over satellites
– sending of pictures via modem-modem connections or via SSTV
USENET for the win.
IRC is wonderfull for radio band. Small , simple and fast.
LORA for example working exelent
Or just use Packet-Radio and real radio transceivers.
My ISP uses packet inspection and blocks SMTP, IRC and other legacy services because they were widely used in malware. Honestly, Discord isn’t that bad once you get used to it and I think I prefer hanging out there than on Wikipedia IRC – man what a cancer full of self-righteouism it was.
IRC isn’t going away anytime soon. A local VEX team had their discord channel banned and all their communications are gone because they were using terms someone thought were wrong think. Nothing in the channel was bad just someone somewhere got a bug up their rear end about coding terms and bam all gone. The sad part is this is either the 3’rd or 4’th time I’ve seen discord kill a VEX channel over specific words being used for their development. So the coach (locally not sure what the other teams ended up doing) setup ircd-hybrid and they do not have an issue with their communications going away any more.
remember discord is kind of like rossman is saying with clippy, if it is not yours they will take it from you.
Sounds like arguments I’ve heard over the master/slave terminology when I was coding. Same terminology is used in industrial controls, automotive, etc.
That was absolutely virtue signallers looking for a fight to make them feel important.
Definitely. Rename default branch to fix racism. Then go write code for literal nazis.
110% that is what it was each time I am sure. I am also sure it was one of the following that did it
master/slave
whitelist/blacklist
parent/child
aborted
They were using the terms in the correct technical context and like you said someone got a bug up their bottom and the kids were the ones that got hurt in the long run.
IRC’s great if all you want to do is text chat with people who are currently online. Just gotta make sure you don’t care about talking to people while on vacation in a different time zone of course
Just gotta make sure you don’t care about talking to people while on vacation in a different time zone of course
If there’s not a deliver-message-later IRC bot or service out there already, there could be if someone wrote one. You’ll need some way of authenticating users to prevent mis-delivery. I’ve long forgotten if NICKSERV and other services have message-storing-for-later-delivery capability built in or not.
You mean email?
The way people handled it back in the day, you logged onto your university mainframe and left an instance of IRC running on screen, then signed out. That way you were constantly online while away.
The mobile logistics of it was poor to non-existent though. Imagine trying to download a megabyte of log files over GPRS with a cellphone hooked up to your laptop, or even a plain GSM data modem that was billed by the minute. Likewise, IRCing on a POTS modem cost a lot of money. It was really a system enjoyed by people living in university dormitories, or rich enough to have a dedicated line at home. It had a brief window around early 2000’s when people got DSL at home but no smartphones, because the moment smartphones came around you got Facebook and Twitter in your pocket, and that was better.
The only problem with IRC is that all the good old haunts are now occupied by the people who never left IRC.
Consider that IRC didn’t really work on mobile. You don’t have a stable IP and it broke connection all the time if it worked at all. You needed a “screen” which meant you needed a server you’d SSH into, which would keep your connection alive to log the conversation, and that was cumbersome and not many people did that. To really talk with people, you had to be online at the same time, which in practice meant you needed to be at home – sometimes up at ungodly hours to catch someone in a different time zone. So people left for the other IM services, and forums and boards as soon as those became widespread.
That meant, for a good decade and more, the only people who remained on IRC were those who insisted on sticking to their old ways, or had no other life to begin with. Not exactly a fun crowd to talk with these days.
On the other hand, it means that people who are on IRC generally are in front of a computer. They aren’t trying to eat, walk and drive cars at the same time, and can type faster. This makes for a more natural conversation than instant messages.
Both have their places, I wouldn’t replace instant messages with IRC nor the other way around.
“A time when the Internet was a place to escape to, not escape from”. This is the sentence I’ll carry with me.
I met a lovely lady on IRC in early 1999. She’s sitting next to me today.
There were quite a few shenanigans beginning to happen on IRC starting in the early ’90s with migration to AOL chatrooms after that. Or so I hear.
Anyone who is going to defend IRC as being sufficient in this day and age really ought to read this thread from Ariadne Conill, who spent a decade or two in the trenches trying to make it even remotely competitive:
IRC doesn’t cover more than 10% of what people need anymore. It doesn’t even meet the table stakes. If you’re thinking that it’s in any way comparable to Discord, then you are totally oblivious to essentially everything Discord offers to someone managing a community.
Really, this thread is required reading for ANY foss project that wants to unseat a proprietary product.
Some bridges between IRC and competitors in the chat protocols world are annoying. Maybe they will be the poison that takes down IRC.
Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.