IRC [LWN.net]

IRC

Posted Feb 21, 2026 20:57 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: IRC by marcH
Parent article: Open-source Discord alternatives

> 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.

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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)