However, there are plenty of reasonable people out there, too. A spirited political discussion on the Textual IRC client for Mac. You’ll encounter people saying anything you can possibly imagine (and many things you can’t).

It’s like the Wild West of the web, with plenty of potentially offensive content. We don’t recommend you let your kids use IRC. Android: Try IRCCloud or AndroIRC, both of which are free.Chrome: Popular free clients for Chrome include CIRC and Byrd.Linux: Try WeeChat or HexChat, both of which are open source.Mac: Many people use Textual (free trial, and then a $7.99 in-app purchase) or Igloo IRC ($5.99).Windows: You can get a free 30-day trial of mIRC (it’s $20 afterward to purchase a license) or use HexChat.In most cases, all you have to do is download an IRC client (or install it from an App store), type a name you’d like to use, and you’ll be presented with a list of popular IRC servers.īelow are some popular IRC clients for different platforms: How to Connect to IRC TodayĬonnecting to IRC today is easier than ever thanks to the client programs available for all major platforms. Luckily, thanks to IRC, you can turn back the clock to 1993 and be a dog online again. In 1993, The New Yorker published a cartoon entitled, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” It became symbolic of the freedom of identity that came with online anonymity at the time. Web forums, instant messaging (like AIM), social media, SMS text messaging, collaborative services (like Slack and Discord), and even 3D worlds and games (like Second Life and Minecraft) have all contributed to IRC’s dive in popularity.Įven though IRC’s population is only a fraction of what it used to be, a core group of people who just want basic text chat are still on there chatting to this day. Still, many people have abandoned IRC since the early ’00s due to the rise of the myriad competing online social spaces. Peak usage of IRC also coincided with peak use of the network to trade pirated software (“warez”), so not all of those people were using IRC to chat in the first place.

However, the number of people using them has dropped dramatically ( some say 60 percent) from its peak around 2003-05. Today, there are still over 2,000 IRC servers and almost 500 IRC networks (groups of affiliated servers) operating worldwide.

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