IRC Networks Show No Signs of Going Away, IRC Enters Its 39th Year
This month IRC turns 38. Last month I explained to a High Court judge what IRC is, how it works, and where it started (or why). The short story is, someone ran a bot through IRC to make allegations about what was there. That "someone" then produced a large bundle of computer-generated "legal papers". The judge rejected all these allegations. It was a waste of the court's time. Reading informal IRC logs wasn't the purpose of this court. This was made by a computer program, which resulted in thousands of pages of printouts. It wasn't the first time.
Anyway, netsplit.de sees no slowdown in IRC adoption. There are still over 500 known networks of decent size as many choose to control their own network and - by extension - their community. Freenode cannot be trusted and Libera.Chat has or had a slop infestation.
Days ago our ircd (IRC daemon) got some security patches, which we've since applied. Based on these official pages (sadly outsourced to proprietary software controlled by Microsoft), the impact on us is minimal, the new version will run after the next reboot.
That IRC daemons are still actively developed and patched in summer of 2026 (over 38 years after IRC was born) says a lot about IRC's importance. █