May 9, 2026
Rediscovering IRC

I think the last time I used IRC in any meaningful way was over 25 years ago. Back then I had a small group of friends who made the transition from America Online chat rooms and forums to private IRC channels without any interdiction from a nosy TOSAdvisor. Scripting bots, using the BitchX client, and trading warez over DCC were the cool things to do at the time.

Now IRC seems flooded with lurkers, bot farms, and the occasional spammer. It's much harder to find your own community or to encourage friends to try out IRC when there's so many centralized alternatives like Discord or Slack. Regardless, I'm going to give IRC another chance (and be yet another lurker waiting for non-AI bot generated conversation).

There are surprisingly very few graphical IRC clients on modern MacOS X, which I'm using as a daily driver. My favorite so far is Textual 7.2.6 which is no longer maintained, but it works great and is worth the $11.99 fee after the month trial in my opinion. There is also a community support channel on irc://irc.libera.chat/#textual. I was previously using LimeChat, but I received warnings that it would no longer be supported on Apple silicon.

To really understand how IRC works beyond simple everyday commands like /nick and /join, I highly recommend reading the reference document Modern IRC Client Protocol listed below. This isn't as dry as reading an RFC or IEEE document, and I think it is easily accessible to a non-IT professional. The newer IRCv3 specs can also be found at the link below for anyone interested.

Anyway, I'm probably preaching to the choir for you gopher and gemini readers. Let's make IRC cool again! Hope to see you out there.

Link to Modern IRC Client Protocol:
https://modern.ircdocs.horse/

Link to IRCv3 Specifications:
https://ircv3.net/irc/

phi1618