The End of Freenode

The DALnet is still around though

While self-hosting sounds fun, I think part of made for example freenode so fruitful is the concentration of projects. It's easy to pop over in a different channel when you're already on the network, and concentrating similar projects makes it likely that you find something interesting.

I see a 4k user drop on the past 24h on https://isfreenodedeadyet.com/ I wonder if that was the #python ban hammer

OFTC numbers look stable for the whole ordeal OTOH

Libera now has 2/3rds of the Freenode users, that number I think was 1/2 a couple of days ago.

I wonder when will the penny drop.

Tens of thousands of users is not actually that large these days for a worldwide chat app though? I don't know exactly how many concurrent users apps like Slack or Discord have, but I'm willing to bet it's at least two orders of magnitude more than ten thousand. Let's not even compare it to the real giants like Whatsapp and WeChat.

Yes, networks have a networking effect (duh).

First, its about discoverability - on many networks you can see in what channels someone is in by simply /whois'ing them - allowing you to find other channels you might be interested in.

Second, if you want to create your own channel - you will most likely choose a network where your target audience already is. Creating a channel there is usually easy - /join a channel that does not exist yet, and often register it with the services with /cs register.

Setting up your own IRC Network is not that hard - but you need a server you can run IRC on, pick one of the many IRCds, pick a services package (Atheme and Anope are the most popular). And then you need to administer that network. (Which often means NOT doing anything.)

Creating your own IRC Network can be fun, and you can learn a lot of interesting things. But it is also time consuming. Creating a channel on an existing network is usually 2 commands away.