Our IRC Community Turns 17 Very Shortly
LAST year we wrote about our IRC anniversary. We started IRC in 2008 (I myself had used IRC since around 1994) and we've done that nonstop since then... every single day. In 2021 we left Freenode to found our own independent network (Libera.Chat will turn 4 very soon; we're not interested in its policies) and it has gradually grown since then.
We've long advocated self-hosting and we're better off for it. Hosting IRC from one's home (residential ISPs) is almost infeasible due to reliability issues, but relying on one's own domain and/or server is another matter.
Despite Canonical (or Ubuntu) badmouthing IRC this year, IRC is doing well and netsplit.de is aware of about 500 IRC networks of decent size.
Towards the end of summer IRC as a protocol will get quite close to its 40* anniversary.
IRC started a few years after the GNU Manifesto and it's still relevant, widely used, and generally reliable.
A few years from now our IRC community will turn 20. █