I visited the site to see what the extensions are and at first i thought that there might be a few of them but it doesn't look that bad.

Then i noticed the horizontal scrollbar :-P

Emojis and reacts are the only extensions that can cause people to have a meaningfully different view. It's part of why it took so long to ratify replies, and reacts still are not ratified.

We're also discussing ways for servers to provide a fallback to clients which don't support them.

HTTP is also still somewhat popular.

But, seriously, that got me curious. There are many protocols from that early era that are still with us today. NTP, DNS, SMTP, IMAP, BGP, SNMP, NFS, ICMP. If you allow the 1990's as counting as "old" we can add SSH and SSL, DHCP, LDAP.

Actually, its just inertia and lack of reliable forum hosting, the actual "killer app" that replaced volatile and unarchivable chat content, but no one learned from it and people flocked to Discord, which is even more hostile to archiving/scanning chat history.

Everything decentralized will keep being used. Stuff is sticky.

More illuminating: To what (relative) extend? And what's the trajectory?

Looking at Google Trends: https://trends.google.com/explore?q=%2Fm%2F03t2s%2C%2Fg%2F11...

Yeah, but the major upgrades for things like telnet and ftp were adding appropriate encryption layers and improved authentication to include things like certificates. IRC shoehorned those into the connections awkwardly but it's still not often mandatory and registration is painful.

Also usenet is still very popular but mostly used for file sharing.

FTP is still used quite a bit. For what it’s useful for, nothing has come close to replacing it.

But as IRC has a social network component, it's more of a social thing than anything inherent to IRC.

I'm here looking for other telenet (not telnet) oldheads, finding nobody.

what about SMTP?

COBOL is still used 50 years later.

I consciously use IRC like that: I don't have a bouncer, and connect only when I feel bored and want to see what is going in some channels (nowadays mostly just #emacs on Libera). I can only follow the conversation when I am online and there, and when I leave there is nothing to catch up to. In some sense it is like a digital third-space as oppose to a permanent dual presence that I have to share my attention with. Depending on your use-case this is not ideal, but for me it is a nice, relaxing addition to a lazy weekend evening when I have nothing better to do.

There are irc clients that work on mobile, like this one from the original author of sway: https://codeberg.org/emersion/goguma

It’s just they need a bouncer (an always online irc server you run) for things like push notifications (and chat history on servers without the chat history extension).

Bouncers (and some IRC v3 extensions on newer servers) allow you to be logged in to the same account from different devices.

I’ve also had some fun writing a bridge from discord to irc for some personal discord servers (but it uses some account impersonation hijinks that make it impractical for other to use).

IMO those are the main reasons IRC isn't still used. It's basically only usable on a desktop or always-stationary laptop, or with a bouncer which is obviously expensive to set up and doesn't provide a good user experience.

in general discord has a very bad app and usability, irc regardless of client is a clear upgrade

really need the simple voice chat for me to use it.

I mean, it seemed mobile enough for that tv presenter to get caught on a plane being a pedo on IRC

why wouldn’t mobile access work? Its just a protocol

Many GUI IRC clients do image / video embedding, even 10 years ago. Voice chat / video / screenshare is probably not a good fit unless you run some kind of secondary infrastructure like Jitsi and make it look like it's part of the client. Doesn't seem like a great fit though.

I know it is a different protocol, but doesn't Mumble provide this to some degree?

I feel like this is completely missing the point of what IRC is.

I appreciate its text-only nature and would never want to see image/video embeds and/or voice chat in my client.

Give Matrix a try.

Note: Twitch chat isn't real IRC, but exposes an IRC-compatible interface.

That’s just nostalgia. You wouldn’t miss bouncers, worrying about presence, multiple devices, file sharing, and more.

Some never left. Notoriously, some bigtech companies have an internal IRC network for tech discussions because that's one communication system that you can rely on to stay up even during catastrophic outages.

It's still active.

> A focussed effort to get Matrix working

At what point do we say matrix isn't going to work? It's been like this for years. It's so overengineered on an immutable chat history on a blockchain it has crossed the line into "way too expensive to run and maintain for streams of cat pictures and memes". Worse is better.

Isn't exactly the beauty of IRC that one person doing something to one node in the network isn't affecting the rest at all?

all of the Freenode staff just rebranded as Libera Chat, bought a new domain and continued on as usual.

Your loss.