IRC is still used massively. It is a relic of the days before corporations took the internet. When it was was still fun. TBH Discord is the closest modern equivalent and the only thing that discord really does better is the embeds and voice.
IRC has a ton of advantages:
1) IRC will run on ancient computers, I was chatting to people on IRC using an Amiga which is 25 years old and will run with virtually no bandwidth. I used to use a 33K modem to speak to my friends after school.
2) Anyone can setup an IRC channel pretty much instantly on a server and you and your friends can start chatting.
3) The message protocol is quite easy to deal with and parse. It also really, really, really fast. Messages are instant, there is zero friction. Slack and Discord are very slow in comparison
4) Building a bots for IRC was super simple. You can be building a bot in minutes in any programming language.
6) You could request files from server and bots IIRC. This was used quite a lot for warez back in the day and much faster than bit-torrent at the time.
7) It is pretty much anonymous. Make a nickname and connect to the server.
8) You can run your own IRC server pretty easily. You download the server software, config some XML/INI files and point your domain at the box. You have your own IRC server.
re Discord, the funny thing is that Discord is proprietary, and I'm not sure how exportable any data and/or voice/embeds are when you want to download it out of the service itself.
Also can't script the client, you can't run your own server. Also with MIRC IIRC correctly you could layout the chat windows pretty much anyway you wanted and even have like a desktop background.
Discord is a lot easier to use, but in a lot of ways it is really limited compared to the IRC clients.
> the only thing that discord really does better is the embeds and voice.
For me, the thing that Discord does really well is having a persistent message history, so I can join a server about a topic, see the pinned posts, read an FAQ channel, and learn a bunch without having to ask a question. That may be improved with IRC now, but at least when I was last using it (wow, 2 decades ago?!) that was a real pain point.
I threw TheLounge on a raspi in the basement and I have persistent message history now. Hit it from any browser, and I have a very Discord-like or Slack-like interface.
Been meaning to check out Convos which looks like it solves much the same problems.
IRC has a ton of advantages:
1) IRC will run on ancient computers, I was chatting to people on IRC using an Amiga which is 25 years old and will run with virtually no bandwidth. I used to use a 33K modem to speak to my friends after school.
2) Anyone can setup an IRC channel pretty much instantly on a server and you and your friends can start chatting.
3) The message protocol is quite easy to deal with and parse. It also really, really, really fast. Messages are instant, there is zero friction. Slack and Discord are very slow in comparison
4) Building a bots for IRC was super simple. You can be building a bot in minutes in any programming language.
https://pythonspot.com/building-an-irc-bot/
5) IIRC clients allowed you to write scripts to script the client itself.
e.g. MIRC had a scripting language that was just plain text
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIRC_scripting_language
6) You could request files from server and bots IIRC. This was used quite a lot for warez back in the day and much faster than bit-torrent at the time.
7) It is pretty much anonymous. Make a nickname and connect to the server.
8) You can run your own IRC server pretty easily. You download the server software, config some XML/INI files and point your domain at the box. You have your own IRC server.