You just have to find a server and channel community that fits your personal style. 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.
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Windows: You can get a free 30-day trial of mIRC (it’s $20 afterward to purchase a license) or use HexChat.
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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:
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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. All is open for others to see, so we might not feel as free as we’d like to experiment with new ideas. Often, that profile is also linked to photos of you, as well as your family, friends, and coworkers. For many of us, our on- and offline selves have merged on social networking platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Today, that sense of anonymity, while not entirely extinct, is rarer. Some found this threatening, but it was also very liberating for people in marginalized groups, who could exist online without judgment. However, back then, it was unlikely your IP was linked to your real-life personal info in a public way.īefore profile photos and centralized social media became common, you could easily choose an online persona and occupy it with a low risk of public repercussions. People could (and still can) see your IP address and guess your general geographic location. That anonymity wasn’t perfect, of course. 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.
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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. It allowed people from all over the world to share historic news, find romance, or talk about almost any topic with like-minded enthusiasts in real time.
IRC started in Finland in 1988 and soon became an international internet sensation. With no centralized authority over who can host a server, people are free to switch servers at will or even start their own. IRC is a standard Internet protocol that allows people to run their own text-based chat servers with its own selection of channels organized by topic (for example, a channel called #music for talking about music).
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