Ask HN: Curious to know if people still use IRC?

It's been mostly reduced to free software projects channels/networks and just semi-private channels for groups of friends who've been on IRC for years now. So #archlinux, #dolphin-emu, #python, ##machinelearning, etc. all on Freenode are pretty active.

There's some hobby and subreddit related channels too. Like ##chess, and #rubik.

Other than that, the language learning community was surprisingly very active years ago, so it's still kinda alive. Language-specific channels like ##deutsch, ##espanol, etc. on Freenode are kinda alive. There's also ##learnanylanguage.

I recently started a greenfield project with some newer (to me) technologies. After some Googling for issues, I decided to try some Freenode channels related to the frameworks/languages. To my surprise, the people on IRC were far more helpful on average than the official Slack channels or forums normally advertised. I highly recommend it for code help, but I've yet to re-explore some of the more hobby related channels of my past.

Every day,

It's become a social network of sorts for geeks, despite the age of the protocol I still find it the least "invasive" and most friendly experience, but that's probably because I spent the time configuring a client that's nice for me. (preview: http://imgs.fyi/img/9ve2.png )

I run a network even, called darkscience and it's available at irc.darkscience.net (TLS only on port 6697) the lobby is #darkscience

ircs://irc.darkscience.net:6697/#darkscience (for those that can parse the url!).

Everyone here is welcome to join us of course, but we put a high emphasis on civility.

I use IRC as a last resort since many of the regulars there are rude assholes.