[noamchomsky1]

how many people still use irc? sad, but i would have thought discord would have pretty much killed it off.

[ninjin]

We are somewhere over 260,000 [1] and I am not going anywhere at least.

[1]: https://netsplit.de

[throw101010]

Just in terms of IRC as a protocol there are actually millions of daily users, many live chat features on the Web (like on video streaming websites such as Twitch) use IRC as a basis: https://dev.twitch.tv/docs/chat/irc/

Now for that example it isn't a full IRC implementation, but you can use a common IRC client to connect and chat on such services.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

How many of these are bots/bouncers, running on some forgotten vhost?

[Piraty]

i am annoyed whenever i learn that a popular open source project's (only) real time communication/support channel is on one of the closed platforms; i then chose to not use it.

i've not encountered projects (relevant to me at least) which moved from IRC to closed platforms, some moved to matrix though (which is only mildly annoying to me).

Also with the network adoption [0] of ircv3 features like history playback, the need for bouncers on always-on 24/7 machines should decrease

[0]: https://ircv3.net/support/networks

[blkhawk]

personally I think discord is shit - I wish it would go away. IRC is a lot more resilient towards takeovers and enshittification. look at what happened to slack.

[cassianoleal]

What happened to Slack, if you don't mind me asking?