Spam and Chatbot Spam in Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
Since we last looked at IRC networks known to Andreas Gelhausen's netsplit.de the number has grown further and over 300,000 users of IRC (some may be bots or duplicates across networks) could be seen online simultaneously.
In our network, which is standalone, we keep the daemon up to date and combat impersonations as best we can to avoid repetition of past incidents.
Looking at Libera.Chat, the presumed successor of Freenode, earlier this year it had a problem with chatbots pretending to be IRC users and it gradually culled many of them. We recently got told that the FSF's IRC channels (which it moved to Libera.Chat despite me advising them against it), are practically dead. Not even chatbots.
So far, as far as we are aware, no chatbot (or LLM) bothered us in any way in our network, but we did get the habitual spam bots (sending spam directly to users, transmitting scans), which have been lulled and not seen in about a month.
Maintaining one's own IRC network requires some housekeeping, but it's simpler than outsourcing to malicious companies. In the latter, many things can go very wrong.
One weak argument against IRC autonomy is that it makes one harder to find, but it also makes one less susceptible to abuse and spam. █
Image source: Trash