IRC is (still) amazing even in today’s Internet era and here’s why.
If you are very young you probably never heard of IRC before. IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat, it’s a Internet protocol that allows people to run their own text-based chat servers with their own selection of channels. You could look at this like some sort of prehistorical Discord.
The main advantage, at least to me, is it’s simplicity. It’s just a wall of plain-text, that is also limited by the amount of characters/lines you can actually send. This makes you pay more attention to actual text compared to just a wall of images and emoticons (just like this blog!). Another thing is the fact that IRC is decentralized. This is even more relevant nowadays compared to years ago, anyone can setup their own server and do whatever they want.
But it’s not all rainbows and unicorns. You can find great people and communities on some networks (Libera.Chat is a pretty good example), but like the rest of the Internet there are a lot of strange people here, so be careful!
Today’s top active IRC servers are very far from what it used to be many years ago in terms of activity, but as I mentioned above you can still find some great communities and have a nice chat. List of top IRC networks, sorted by the amount of users:
If you want to try IRC yourself you can find more information over at Libera.Chat. They provide a nice collection of guides surrounding IRC.
and if you are interested in setting up your own server, you can follow this amazing guide written by Termer over at LandChad.net
P.S. If you want to chat with me on IRC, you can find me here -> irc.libera.chat
Fun fact: Twitch.tv chat supports IRC (somewhat).