IRC [LWN.net]

IRC

Posted Feb 21, 2026 17:20 UTC (Sat) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
Parent article: Open-source Discord alternatives

> For everyone who doesn't want or need a Discord-like "modern" chat experience — IRC will always be an option.

I suspect one of main reasons IRC has been dying is: bad "offline" experience.

"Out of the box" IRC experience: all messages missed when offline!

I once tried Quassel briefly and it seemed to work but it required some effort - and of course it forces you to use a specific client which loses one of key advantages of IRC.

I heard about IRC "bouncers" but none of them seemed "beginner-friendly".

So when I hear "modern" I understand that out of the box I can go offline and not miss messages. Maybe even have multiple devices (e.g. laptop+phone) in sync with each other. I suspect most people take that for granted in this day and age.

to post comments

IRC

Posted Feb 21, 2026 20:57 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> I suspect one of main reasons IRC has been dying is: bad "offline" experience.

...And numerous "walled garden" alternatives pushed quite heavily by $pre_bigtech that have risen and fallen in line with their inevitable enshittification.

IRC

Posted Feb 23, 2026 3:26 UTC (Mon) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

Walled gardens never get any sympathy and can be blamed for many things but in this particular IRC case they sound a bit like a scapegoat.
Even while dying, IRC has always attracted tons of "hackers" and they did not all suddenly abandon IRC and all migrate overnight to these walled gardens which they hate. So why didn't these hackers help make the IRC experience more "modern"? Either because the protocol is poorly suited, or because they didn't care enough about being "modern". I don't know which it is but in any case the enshittified wall gardens are not much to blame here. Sometimes "yourself" is where most of the blame lies (apologies for anthropomorphizing IRC)

IRC

Posted Feb 22, 2026 13:29 UTC (Sun) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

That's the biggest reason I wouldn't go back to IRC. I mainly participate in channels where the volume is low enough that I can read every message, and I don't need to worry about missing potentially important or interesting conversations that happen while I'm asleep or on holiday etc. And, crucially, I know the other participants won't miss conversations either - I can reply to something they said hours ago without having to care whether they're currently online or not, and without having to switch to a different asynchronous messaging platform (like email).

I used to use IRC with irssi+screen+ssh for persistence, and it sounds like Quassel provides similar functionality with a slightly less rubbish UI, but it still doesn't allow that semi-asynchronous communication unless everyone else is using the same non-default client (and they almost certainly aren't).

IRC

Posted Feb 22, 2026 19:04 UTC (Sun) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link] (4 responses)

ZNC is really nice for that "offline" experience (https://wiki.znc.in/ZNC). It speaks the IRC protocol to connecting clients, so any IRC-capable client will work fine. It has a plugin ecosystem, which includes a web interface (that you must not put onto the public Internet...). While initial configuration and learning may seem a steep climb, my experience has been that it is mostly 'set it and forget it'.

I use Weechat on my desktop/laptop and "IRC for Android" on my phone with ZNC as the bouncer (aka "offline IRC proxy"). Sadly, "IRC for Android" seems to be abandoned as a project, and backups don't work, but I don't care about backups... since I use ZNC as my "single source of truth" for all my IRC accounts (Libera.Chat, OFTC).

ZNC is certainly oriented towards a DIY approach to computing services. Is DIY for 'beginners'? Not really. But, then again, DIY is not really for beginners, but everyone is a beginner at some point. :)

IRC

Posted Feb 22, 2026 19:23 UTC (Sun) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

+1 for znc. And if you pair it with matterircd, you can also interact with Mattermost and Slack over IRC. It's not a huge with for Mattermost, but gating Slack through IRC give you ways to block the Slack anti-features like the stupid Slackbot.

I leave znc running on my Raspberry Pi 4 server 24/7.

IRC

Posted Feb 22, 2026 20:10 UTC (Sun) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (2 responses)

That's definitely a long way from "sign up, start using it, it just works".

IRC

Posted Feb 22, 2026 20:30 UTC (Sun) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link] (1 responses)

Sure. It depends(tm) on what you want from your computing environment, including considerations around the level of surveillance, advertising and commodification of your time and attention you are willing to put up with for less apparent effort.

"No such thing as a 'free lunch'." was such a illustrative phrase. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_such_thing_as_a_free_lunch)

IRC

Posted Feb 23, 2026 3:15 UTC (Mon) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> "No such thing as a 'free lunch'."

While proprietary solutions are generally more user-friendly, I hope it's only because they have more resources and are ahead of the curve, not because user-friendliness and privacy are technically incompatible with each other. We are only talking about messaging here; I don't know whether it's a "basic human right" but it certainly should not be rocket science. Maybe asking for privacy + user-friendliness while not paying anything is still a bit too much (someone has to pay for those cloud bills...), but it should be technically possible to have at least the first two at the same time? Looking forward to it.

PS: I have no idea whether something more "modern" could be built while preserving the IRC protocol. I'm only noticing that none of the very many alternatives seems to try that.

IRC

Posted Feb 23, 2026 2:20 UTC (Mon) by mroche (subscriber, #137163) [Link] (2 responses)

> So when I hear "modern" I understand that out of the box I can go offline and not miss messages. Maybe even have multiple devices (e.g. laptop+phone) in sync with each other. I suspect most people take that for granted in this day and age.

Have you taken a look at the IRCv3 developments in the works. Several of its goals are addressing issues related to these problems.

https://ircv3.net/

IRC

Posted Feb 23, 2026 3:31 UTC (Mon) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (1 responses)

I had never heard of IRCv3, sorry I kept writing "it's dying" above. Maybe it's not too late?

IRC

Posted Feb 24, 2026 3:00 UTC (Tue) by mroche (subscriber, #137163) [Link]

First sentence was supposed to end with a question mark 😅

I personally don't use IRC anymore. The need ended when Fedora and CentOS migrated to Matrix. But I do find the v3 work interesting, but like anything else it only moves forward if people put in the effort.

IRC

Posted Feb 23, 2026 9:28 UTC (Mon) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

I suspect another reason with software projects in particular is that the ability to just quote a multi-line piece of code with formatting preserved it quite useful in these discussions.