4 Years Ago Freenode Crumbled From Within
In exactly 4 weeks from now libera.chat IRC (Libera Chat Internet Relay Chat) turns 4, but the internal struggles (at Freenode) became known or began to spill over several weeks earlier, some time at the end of April 2021. We got some leaks back then. We published videos and articles about the topic. It matters to us because prior to that we used Freenode, not our own network. Freenode is still around*.
After so much time (4 years!) IRC has endured quite a lot and apparently there are still hundreds of thousands of users online at any given time. Judging by the "459 known IRC networks" which netsplit.de keeps track of (polling every ~2 hours), this past week the total across networks was around 273k (at peak):
Some time soon it'll be our 17th IRC anniversary and IRC itself turns 37 in August. It all started in Finland, a subject covered here earlier today in relation to GNU/Linux. █
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* It shrank this past year:
At this moment:
* There are 17 users and 5392 invisible on 10 servers * 8 :operator(s) online * 15 :unknown connections * 9188 :channels formed * I have 3103 clients and 1 servers * Current local users: 3103 Max: 4101 * Current global users: 5409 Max: 10281