In what years was IRC most used ? reddit / irc ---------------------------------------------------------------------- basically_clueless · 2023-03-30 18:35 https://netsplit.de/networks/statistics.php?net=EFnet efnet peaked between 2000-2008 https://netsplit.de/networks/statistics.php?net=dalnet dalnet peaked in 2002... so it seems to be that range, late 90/s to late 2000's ---------------------------------------------------------------------- evilelmer · 2023-03-30 18:37 95ish Early 90s were wild, end of the BBS scene, start of the net ---------------------------------------------------------------------- I-am-fun-at-parties · 2023-03-30 19:49 > start of the net uhhhh ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SocialRedditScore · 2023-03-30 20:21 I think he means when dial up modems started becoming popular, which was definitely around that time period. My dad's 56k modem was a huge deal in '96. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- badpie99 · 2023-03-30 20:46 A [BBS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system) was a single server you would dial into, see some news or send a message and then log off, vs. the internet where you are connected to a vast array of interconnected servers and networks. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- I-am-fun-at-parties · 2023-03-30 20:51 today I found a bug in 386BSD's find(1) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- GMAK24 · 2023-03-30 23:09 I would say 2000. Just at the DSL era or about this. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gatewayy · 2023-03-31 00:01 This thread is making me feel my age today. :P ---------------------------------------------------------------------- bctrainers · 2023-03-31 00:24 The peak of IRC, well, I would gander from 2002 to 2005... primarily with QuakeNet, UnderNet, IRCNet, and Efnet leading the way. Once 2006 rolled around, other means of mass communication and a more dynamic internet started to take place. No less the fact that social media networks began to surface. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- cos · 2023-03-31 01:37 It's actually really hard to say, because as IRC became less and less the chat system people use to talk to others on the net, it got adopted more and more in companies and organizations with private IRC nets that were not connected to any of the big public nets. I doubt anyone has the numbers on those, how many people used them, when they were big. And then there's the fact that, AFAIK, Google still uses IRC internally. When I was at Google, up until just a few years ago, it was still the preferred internal chat system, because it was the only thing available that had these two qualities: 1. It doesn't send Google internal communications to some other company's servers. 2. ... but it also doesn't depend on most of the services in Google production that nearly everything else at Google is integrated with and has numerous cross-dependencies with. Which means it's the form of communication people can depend on still working, and working well, when other stuff has outages. With Google being so big, who knows, it might have more users on just that one IRC network than there were people on all the public ones in some of the years we think of as being IRC's biggest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PyramidClub · 2023-03-31 02:42 [2003.](https://web.archive.org/web/20170815064620/http://royal.pingdo m.com/2012/04/24/irc-is-dead-long-live-irc/) Roughly 1 million users. Never got close to the [17 million BBS users in 1994.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- eggbean · 2023-03-31 08:58 That was the start of the WorldWideWeb, not the internet. I got on the net in '94 and it got much bigger by 2000, especially IRC. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- MachaHack · 2023-03-31 12:23 My understanding is that Google has migrated to Google Chat these days. Slack has also swooped up a lot of the smaller companies that used to run in house irc ---------------------------------------------------------------------- cos · 2023-03-31 12:54 In house IRC definitely got displaced by Slack at most places, which is why a reasonable guess for when IRC was most used might be just before Slack dropped its IRC client compatibility. However, at Google, while everyone used Google chat internally, IRC was still pretty much required for engineering because Google Chat is affected by many of the same service issues that affect anything else at Google. You cannot depend on it when there's a problem with the stuff you work on, because chances are high that chat will have problems at the very same time for the same cause. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Aavram30 · 2023-03-31 15:21 From '95 to 2005 .. In 92 or so was made, it needed a bit to get known, in 2000 was full known and ppl goes crazy, then the falling down, since 2005 going down.. Last years some old users comes back but find dessert so abandoned.. Right now you can find old ppl who loves the way social network was, and they wait for you to log in and present yourself, but new generation doesn't like to socialize without pics and info.. I personally believe this is creation of social, and I love to meet new ppl filtered by how/what they think, mentality, ecc.. Without knowing their background or social position ---------------------------------------------------------------------- rainbownerdsgirl · 2023-03-31 16:42 2023 if you know you know ---------------------------------------------------------------------- platzbo · 2023-04-03 22:19 Either 2023 or 2020 during the height of the pandemic. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- chucky843 · 2023-04-06 01:19 We was lit the in early 2000s ---------------------------------------------------------------------- chucky843 · 2023-04-06 01:20 28.8k was too 😂😂🤷🏾‍♂️ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2023-04-06 22:45 IRC had ~10M users in 2004-2005. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PyramidClub · 2023-04-06 23:27 I posted a reference. Where's yours? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2023-04-06 23:31 I remember reading that years ago, someone made an approximate survey possibly including hidden and private networks as well based on IRCD and ports usage, but I can't remember where I read it, probably Ars Technica since they were involved with IRC. If you google it you'll see some references about that specific number, for example on this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat > IRC reached 6 million simultaneous users in 2001 and 10 million users in 2004-2005, dropping to around 350k in 2021. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- xanfoo · 2023-04-08 17:04 97-2006ish were my best times on irc ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Cypris2369 · 2023-04-10 11:58 This is 100% speculation with zero fact checking, so I am probably wrong, but... generally speaking, in terms of public use (hard to include the networks that want to stay off the radar) I'd guess that IRC's prime was in the mid-90's to the mid-2000's. I doubt we will ever see networks with numbers like what we saw during that period. I was quite shocked to find out that an IRC network called "Libera Chat" popped up in mid-May 2021 which \[according to Wikipedia\] is the most popular of the \_published\_ (I repeat, PUBLISHED) IRC Networks in terms of average monthly users. Again, this is nothing but speculation. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- opticalnebulous · 2023-04-16 23:37 I think I remember using it in the early Aughts. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ComputerTech312 · 2023-04-27 15:23 Didn't know that Google used/uses IRC as an internal chat system, interesting. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Superher0landing · 2023-05-29 14:30 i was on IRC from 1995 to about 2006. i started using dialup to connect to a BBS and I had a fuckin 9.6k modem and it sucked. Broadband internet was such a game changer. I became an op in #teen and hung out in #virii from time to time. I remember when Undernet got taken over, it was madness. The logs are still floating around somehwere ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2023-05-31 14:35 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- No_Version_2941 · 2023-07-14 06:13 which channels? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- platzbo · 2023-07-14 15:47 Twitch channels