IRC in 2025: Who Still Uses It and Why

Somebody declares IRC dead approximately once a month. Usually on Hacker News. The comments fill with people pointing out that they're currently using IRC. This cycle has repeated since about 2010 with no sign of stopping. The declaring and the using continue in parallel, neither affecting the other.

The Numbers: Who's Where

As of early 2025, the major IRC networks by simultaneous user count look roughly like this:

• Libera.Chat: 40,000-50,000 users. The successor to Freenode, and the default home for open-source project channels.
• OFTC: 15,000-20,000 users. Hosts Debian, Tor, and other infrastructure-focused projects.
• IRCnet: 10,000-15,000 users. Primarily European, no services.
• EFnet: 8,000-12,000 users. The original network, still running.
• Undernet: 8,000-12,000 users. One of the oldest splinter networks.
• QuakeNet: 5,000-8,000 users. Down from 240,000 at peak.
• Rizon: 5,000-8,000 users. Anime, manga, and fansub communities.
• DALnet: 3,000-5,000 users. Recovered partially from the DDoS era.

Total active IRC users across all networks: roughly 150,000-200,000 on any given day. Down from a peak of over a million in the early 2000s. But for a protocol that has been "dying" for fifteen years, those are remarkably stable numbers.

Open Source: IRC's Unshakeable Base

Open-source development is IRC's core constituency and has been since the late 1990s. The reasons are philosophical and practical.

Philosophical: IRC is an open protocol. The server and client software are open source. No single company controls it. For communities that build free software, using a proprietary platform for development coordination feels wrong. Not everyone acts on this principle, but enough do to sustain a large IRC presence.

Practical: IRC is lightweight, scriptable, and integrates trivially with development workflows. A CI/CD pipeline can post build results to an IRC channel with three lines of shell script. A Git hook can announce commits. A monitoring system can alert. Doing the same with Discord or Slack requires API tokens, webhook configurations, and rate limit handling.

Major projects on Libera.Chat as of 2025:

• Linux kernel development — #kernelnewbies, various subsystem channels
• Fedora — Hundreds of channels for different teams and SIGs
• PostgreSQL — #postgresql
• Python — #python (one of the largest channels on the network)
• Arch Linux — #archlinux and related channels
• Gentoo — Full development infrastructure on IRC
• Wine — #winehq
• LLVM/Clang — Development channels

On OFTC:

• Debian — The entire Debian project communicates primarily through OFTC
• Tor Project — Development and community channels
• Sway / wlroots — Wayland compositor development
• Proxmox — Community support

Security and Privacy Communities

Information security researchers and privacy advocates maintain a strong IRC presence. The reasons overlap with open source (open protocol, no corporate control) but add another dimension: IRC is one of the few communication platforms where you can participate without providing a phone number, email address, or real name.

On IRC, you connect with a nickname. If you want, you register an account with NickServ using a throwaway email. Or you don't register at all. Your IP is cloaked. No data mining, no behavioral analytics, no "people you may know" suggestions. For communities that take privacy seriously, this matters.

Multiple security conferences maintain IRC channels for backchannel communication during talks. Bug bounty hunters use IRC for private coordination. Vulnerability disclosure sometimes happens in IRC DMs before public announcements. The lack of message persistence, which is a disadvantage in most contexts, becomes an advantage when you don't want a permanent record of sensitive discussions.

Hackerspaces and Local Groups

Hackerspaces — physical spaces where people build things with technology — often run their own IRC servers or maintain channels on larger networks. The CCC (Chaos Computer Club) community has a significant IRC presence. Regional hacker groups across Europe and North America use IRC as a low-overhead coordination tool.

The appeal is the same as for open source: no dependencies on third-party services, no data collection, no cost. A hackerspace's IRC channel on a self-hosted server is fully under their control. If the space closes, the channel can move to a public network. If the space's internet goes down, the channel still exists on the network.

University computer science departments maintain IRC channels for students. These are less common than they were in 2005, but they persist at institutions with strong systems programming or security programs. MIT, CMU, Georgia Tech, TU Berlin — all have IRC presences of varying sizes.

Quiet Corporate Use

Some companies use IRC internally and don't talk about it much. The reasons are typically: legacy infrastructure that still works, integration with existing tooling, and engineering teams that prefer IRC's minimalism over Slack's notification hell.

A few companies that have publicly acknowledged IRC usage: SUSE, Red Hat (some teams), various ISPs and hosting providers. Game development studios sometimes use IRC for internal communication, particularly those with Linux-heavy engineering teams.

The corporate use case is shrinking. Slack and Microsoft Teams dominate enterprise messaging. But IRC persists in corners where engineering culture is strong enough to resist mandated platform migrations.

Demographics: Who Stayed, Who Left

The people who stayed on IRC tend to share certain characteristics:

• They were using IRC before the alternatives existed
• They value text-only communication and find rich media distracting
• They run their own clients and infrastructure
• They participate in open-source development
• They are, overwhelmingly, software engineers and system administrators

The people who left went to Discord (gamers, general communities), Slack (workplace teams), Matrix (technical users who wanted modern features with open protocols), or simply stopped using real-time chat as their primary communication medium.

New users do join IRC. Not many, but they exist. They typically arrive because they want to contribute to an open-source project and the project's communication happens on IRC. Some stay. Most set up a Matrix bridge and interact through Element. The bridge users are visible in IRC channels by their distinctive hostmasks — they're there, but they're not really there in the way that a WeeChat user with a tmux session on a VPS is there.

IRC in 2025 is smaller, older, and more specialized than IRC in 2003. It is also more stable, more secure (TLS everywhere, SASL authentication, cloaked hostnames), and more focused. The generalist users left for generalist platforms. What remains is a tool that does one thing — real-time text communication — with minimal overhead, maximal flexibility, and zero corporate strings attached. For the people who value those properties, nothing else comes close.

The Modern IRC Toolchain

IRC in 2025 is not your father's IRC. The protocol is the same, but the surrounding toolchain has evolved significantly. Modern IRC usage typically involves:

Persistent connections via bouncers. ZNC is the standard. It maintains your connection to IRC 24/7, buffers messages you miss, and replays them when your client reconnects. Running ZNC on a VPS means you never "disconnect" — you're always present in your channels, whether you're actively reading or not. Some hosting providers offer ZNC as a managed service for a few dollars a month.

Terminal multiplexers. tmux or screen sessions on remote servers, running WeeChat or Irssi. SSH in from any device, and your IRC session is exactly where you left it. This is the setup that power users have used for fifteen years, and nothing has improved on it because nothing needs to.

Mobile access. IRCCloud provides a polished mobile IRC experience with persistent connections (freemium model). The Goguma and Revolution IRC apps offer native Android clients. For iOS, Palaver and Igloo are options. Mobile IRC is possible but remains less convenient than Discord or Slack mobile apps.

Web clients. Kiwi IRC and The Lounge provide browser-based IRC access. The Lounge, in particular, functions as a self-hosted web IRC client with persistent connections — essentially a web-based bouncer. It is the closest thing IRC has to a "modern" interface, and it is genuinely good.

# The Lounge — self-hosted web IRC client
# Install (Node.js required for The Lounge, but this is client-side tooling):
npm install -g thelounge
thelounge start
# Access at http://localhost:9000

The toolchain complexity is IRC's biggest barrier to new users. Setting up a comfortable IRC environment takes 30-60 minutes. Setting up Discord takes 30 seconds. This gap explains the demographic skew more than any protocol limitation. The people who stay on IRC are the people for whom 30 minutes of initial setup is a trivial cost amortized over years of daily use.