Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Still Has Hundreds of Thousands of Simultaneously-Online Unique Users
The scale of IRC 17 years ago:
The "fall of Freenode" (as the most dominant Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network) was revisited yesterday and it was evaluated based on Andreas Gelhausen's netsplit.de. To be clear, I am on 5 IRC networks at the same time, so I can check /lusers (shows number of users in a network) in the main networks, but netsplit.de or Wayback Machines snapshots of netsplit.de give us some historical context. IRC is older than the Web and it remains an essential communication medium for a lot of geeks, more so in the age of web-bloat and intensive surveillance (many look for alternatives to "apps" and bloated copycats of IRC that run in a browser tab at the expense of hundreds of megabytes with very low resilience).
If IRC is ebbing away, it is happening very slowly. People are stubborn enough to stay. We see a decline (number of users) from 340k in 2020 to 293k this week or this month (the steady decline can be seen by comparing to March 2023, March 2022, and March 2021).
In 2007 over a million users were still counted (816 networks were tracked; "There are 484 known IRC networks listed below," it now says).
We adopted IRC in 2008 (after I had used it in the mid-90s onwards). 2007 was 17 years ago, i.e. about halfway between IRC's beginning and the present.
If IRC disappears completely (no more networks online), it might take another 30 years. It doesn't look like IRC is "dying" any time soon. █