Discord has some structures and dynamics that really work against it for the sort of communities IRC excels at.

The standard Discord experience has you look for and join a "server", each of which is meant to feel like distinct island. This has every server duplicate the same set of boilerplate #general, #off-topic etc. channels, as if there are no others. As a result the vast majority of servers are fairly dead and barren, the userbase is spread too thin. Also because the UX makes switching between servers a fairly heavy context switch, so monitoring this deluge of channels is not fun and nobody can stay on top of all of their servers.

I once looked around for maker-y/electronics Discords, and joined probably 7-8, and they were all dead. ##electronics on Libera is highly active.

I recently started using IRC again (I joined a small channel because of a random event). Surprisingly the magic is still there for me.

>besides, those people are largely reachable on slightly more modern services these days

The thing is, people are NOT reachable on IRC in general. They join when they wake up (or return from school, or return from work). When they leave you can't contact them (and you can criticise/praise them freely if you want). Sometimes a new person joins and never returns again. Sometimes they join tomorrow, the day after, and become a regular. Other times someone starts joining less and less frequently, then one day leaves and never returns.

People say "hi" when joining and "bye" when leaving.

I'm general, I realized this is much more similar to talking with real people than modern groupchats. Of course this is just a protocol, and nowadays this behavior is just a choice (everyone can install a mobile client and stay always online. Even back then it was possible with a bouncer). But I'm surprised how invested I became in this micro-community, in a way i never would on a discord server.

I started using IRC when I was 13. I’m 39 now, and it never lost its magic.

While the rest of the internet has turned into some weird corporate thing, IRC is still a nice play for us nerds to hang out.

LONG LIVE LIBERA

the main complaints against Matrix atm seems to be that we have made heavy weather of the migration from 1.0 to 2.0 (“either you get a slow client or a fast but incomplete client”)… or that Element has had to focus on building stuff for govts rather than irc-style communities in order to get sustainable. (see also https://gist.github.com/ara4n/190ad712965d0f06e17f508d1a45b5...). Both problems could be much worse, and we had the annual Matrix Conference a few weeks ago which was a great success (https://element.io/blog/the-matrix-conference-a-seminal-mome...), so I suspect/hope the negative sentiment will pass.

IRC is still around. HexChat is unmaintained, but still works for now.

Libera.chat, EFNET, and such are stil there. Ditto with the SDF IRC server, the ones today at the tildeverse...

True geeks and nerds never left.

There are nice Jabber/XMPP servers out there too.

It's not terribly far from the truth. IRC is a pretty thin layer on top of a generic TCP server. On your classic ircds the notion of users and channels is about the minimum possible, and everything's tightly coupled to the network and DNS. Single-core servers back in the day could and did handle 10,000 active users.

Thanks for the bug report. Should be ok now!

This awk contraption is launched by inetd, and there's not much of any kind of sanity checks for anything. As a result, there was around ten thousand processes running :)

And also, thanks for showing interest. I'll push the source code on the website on the weekend.

As is the gopher service, which is a shame.

It's exactly what it was designed for - text processing! Which fits perfectly for the irc protocol.

I’ve had people be very confused and perplexed when I told them awk is a programming language in the past lol. Most seem to think it’s solely a tool like sort or uniq etc

I have only dabbled in AWK, but I love the book "The AWK Programming Language" by its authors. Its a great read for any programmer, highlighting pragmatic techniques to solve real-world problems.

What I always point out though is the bathtub curve of that perception.

Awk started life as a unique, weird, but extremely clever and expressive environment with which you could do tricks that were impractical anywhere else. And that's sort of back where it is now.

But for a solid decade and a half, awk was a forgotten dinosaur that no one cared about. Because in the era where Everyone Knew Perl, awk had no home. Perl was awk but bigger and better.

But now all us perl nuts have moved on or gone silent, all the kids are writing code for node or python or whatnot, and No One Knows Perl.

And in a world where no one knows perl, awk looks clever again.

> And no, I won't use libera or whatever.

Any special reason? AFAIK, it's effectively the same network run by the same people, just under a different name.

How and why did it implode? I always have a feeling of wanting to go back to basic chat rooms for linux and all but today it´s more like a chore than anything else.