IRC in 2026: Still Running, Still Worth It

Quick answer: IRC is a plain-text chat protocol from August 1988 that still runs a meaningful share of open source development. Around 231,000 people are connected across the top 100 networks right now. Libera.Chat is the one that matters for free software, with roughly 30,000 concurrent users and 21,000 channels. You need a client, a registered nickname, and about ten minutes. It leaks your IP address to the server by default, which is worth understanding before you connect.

Jarkko Oikarinen wrote IRC at the University of Oulu in August 1988. He never wrote down the exact date. "The birthday of IRC was in August 1988. The exact date is unknown, at the end of the month anyways."

He was not building a chat product. He was extending the BBS software he ran on a Sun-3 called `tolsun.oulu.fi`, intending to add Usenet-style news and real-time discussion. He wrote the chat part first, borrowing code from his friends Jyrki Kuoppala and Jukka Pihl, and then realised the rest of the BBS features would not fit. What survived was the part he finished first.

It replaced a program called MUT, MultiUser Talk, on the university's OuluBox. The idea came from Bitnet Relay. By November 1988 it had spread across the internet. By mid-1989 there were about forty servers. In July 1990 the whole network averaged twelve users.

The two nights that made it famous

In January 1991 the Gulf War started, and IRC carried live reports while the television networks were still setting up. More than 300 concurrent users appeared for the first time, which at the time was an enormous number.

Those logs still exist. They sit in an academic archive at ibiblio, and they read exactly the way you would hope:

<Ely:+report> Hmm,{maybe not. i hear alarm sound, not sure.
> LAUNCH NOT DETECTED? SERIIOUS
*WinterMut* reporting a 'very large explosion' in tel aviv
<Ely:+report> ok, i must go. radio instruct to wear mask immed.

The channel was `+report`. The participants are visibly logged in from university machines. Somebody in Tel Aviv is typing about air raid sirens and then leaving to put on a gas mask, and a person at Old Dominion University is reading it in real time. In 1991.

Seven months later, in August 1991, hardliners attempted a coup against Gorbachev and imposed a media blackout. IRC routed around it. The surviving log file is named `report-ussr-gorbatchev`, and the first thing you notice is the nicknames:

<IDFradio> Natto officials: Emergency meeting to take place soon. (Roiters (sp?)).
           Soviet armed forces commander in the eastern republics: Soviet army is
           in full control. Soviet TV still broadcasts movies and music.....
<DJ> [ More way long news ]. The following is the full text of the
     state-of-emergency committee's resolutions...

`IDFradio` is a person retyping Israeli radio bulletins. `DJ` is a person retyping the Dow Jones wire. That is the entire architecture of early internet news in two nicknames: humans acting as protocol adapters between broadcast media and a text channel. The same archive holds logs from the 1992 US election night, the 1994 Northridge earthquake and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

The protocol is almost nothing

RFC 1459 was published in May 1993 by Oikarinen and Darren Reed. The design is startlingly small.

One persistent TCP connection. One line per message, terminated by carriage return and line feed. Messages cap at 512 bytes including the line ending, so 510 usable characters. The command set fits on an index card: `NICK`, `USER`, `JOIN`, `PART`, `PRIVMSG`, `MODE`, `TOPIC`, `KICK`, `QUIT`, and a handful of query commands.

There is no framing layer. No JSON. No handshake beyond four short commands. A full day of IRC costs less bandwidth than loading one modern web page.

Notably absent from the specification: colours, text formatting, character encoding, and CTCP, the sub-protocol that `/me` is built on. All of those were bolted on afterward by convention and never standardised. The document that actually governs implementations today is not an RFC at all but a living spec called Modern IRC, maintained on a website with `.horse` in the domain name.

Ports: 6667 plaintext, 6697 TLS. The 6697 convention was written up as RFC 7194 in 2014, on the Independent Submission stream, which means it documents what everyone already did rather than deciding anything. Port 194 is the one officially registered with IANA for IRC, with Jarkko Oikarinen listed as the contact. Nobody has ever used it.

What happened to freenode

For two decades the free software world lived on freenode. It started in 1995 as a single channel, became Open Projects Net in 1998, and took the freenode name in 2002. At its peak it carried more than 80,000 concurrent users.

In 2017 ownership was transferred to Andrew Lee, the founder of Private Internet Access. Nothing much changed for four years. Then in May 2021 it came apart in about a week.

On 19 May 2021 at least fourteen volunteer staff resigned simultaneously and launched Libera.Chat the same day. Their statement cited advertising pushed onto the freenode website without warning and unexplained changes to network operations.

A week later, on 26 May, freenode management took control of roughly 700 registered channels, removing their owners, under a newly announced policy against "inappropriate advertising." The advertising in question was channel topics mentioning that the project had moved to Libera. Gentoo, Haskell, Elixir and Raku were among those seized. Gentoo called it an open act of hostility and left.

Arch Linux's migration notice from 24 May is the cleanest contemporaneous account, and it is still on their site:

> there has been an ownership dispute over the freenode.net network... The dispute led to the exodus of most former freenode staff from the network and the founding of a new network: libera.chat.

Libera passed 16,500 simultaneous connections in its first week and called itself the fastest-growing IRC network ever, which was true.

The scoreboard five years later, measured this week:

freenode went from 80,000-plus to 5,218. That is a collapse of about 94 percent, and it took roughly five years. The domain today is not really an IRC site anymore; it serves an AI-summarised open source news aggregator with sections for cryptocurrency and AI, and a landing page still advertising "three decades serving the open source community."

Who is actually still on it

This is the part people get wrong in both directions. IRC is neither dead nor thriving. It is small, stable, and load-bearing for a specific set of projects.

Still on IRC: Debian, on OFTC, with `irc.debian.org` as an alias. Arch Linux, on Libera, and the Arch installation environment still ships the irssi client. Gentoo, on Libera, where `#gentoo` has over a thousand connected users. Ubuntu, FreeBSD, PostgreSQL, Wikimedia and the Free Software Foundation. The Linux kernel newbies channel is on OFTC.

Gone to Matrix: Mozilla shut down its IRC server in March 2020. KDE announced its move in 2019. Fedora runs its own Matrix homeserver now and has moved most communication there.

The honest summary is that IRC lost the projects with foundations and paid staff, and kept the projects run by people who like plain text and do not want to depend on anyone's hosted service.

Two numbers put the whole thing in perspective. IRC peaked around ten million simultaneous users in 2004 and 2005. The top hundred networks combined now carry about 231,000. And Libera.Chat, the largest free software network on the internet, finished 2025 with roughly 150,000 registered accounts and an annual loss of about 2,000 Swedish kronor. Call it a hundred and eighty pounds. The infrastructure that a thousand open source projects coordinate on runs on beer money and volunteers.

Two things that happened in 2026

In February, Libera turned on IRCv3. Message tags, server-time, message IDs, batches, `echo-message`, typing indicators. These are the extensions that let a client show you when a message was actually sent rather than when it arrived, and that let bouncers replay history coherently.

Sit with the timing. IRC was written in 1988. The largest free software network on it shipped baseline message tagging in February 2026. Thirty-eight years. The protocol's stubbornness is the reason it still works and the reason it took that long.

In May, Libera published binding rules for AI bots, turning earlier guidance into policy. Bot operators need channel operator permission before joining. Bots must be labelled or use a cloak identifying their operator. And the one worth quoting: an LLM-driven bot requires a human supervisor to be present. "You must ensure that either you or another human who has agreed to supervise your bot is present."

Any LLM processing of channel content counts as public logging under Libera's existing policy, which means it needs permission first regardless of what a privacy statement claims. Fully autonomous agents are effectively banned.

The oldest chat protocol on the internet wrote a coherent, enforceable AI agent policy while most of the platforms that replaced it were still holding meetings about it.

What IRC leaks about you

This is where a security site has to be blunt, because the defaults are not private.

The server always sees your IP address. There is no version of IRC where this is not true. Libera's own documentation says only you and their staff can see your connecting host, and their staff refuse disclosure requests, but the infrastructure sees it regardless.

Cloaks are cosmetic. A cloak replaces the hostmask other users see, turning something like `10-10-32-1.res.dsl.example.com` into `user/jsmith`. On Libera, accounts registered with a verified email have been cloaked automatically since March 2024. It is a real improvement over broadcasting your ISP and rough location to every channel you join. It is not anonymity, and Libera says so directly: your IP can still be exposed if your client does link previews, DCC, or similar.

DCC is the classic leak. Direct Client-to-Client negotiates a peer-to-peer connection through the IRC server and then bypasses the network entirely. The handshake contains your IP address and a port by design. Accepting a file transfer from a stranger hands them your address. The historical vulnerability list is not reassuring either: a buffer overflow in mIRC triggered by filenames longer than fourteen characters, an input validation flaw that could knock over consumer routers, and XDCC bots used for malware distribution for decades.

CTCP leaks your client and OS. A `VERSION` query returns what you are running. Channel mode `+C` blocks CTCPs channel-wide, and most clients can disable automatic replies.

TLS protects the wire and nothing else. Libera offers TLS on 6697, 7000 and 7070, and still accepts plaintext on 6665 through 6667. There is no end-to-end encryption anywhere in IRC. The server reads everything. Channels are routinely logged and published by third parties, and Libera's policy requires loggers to disclose it, which is an honour system.

If you want your home address off the table entirely, connecting through a VPN moves the exposed IP to the provider's exit node. That is a real mitigation for the DCC and hostmask problem specifically, and it is not a magic privacy shield for anything else. We wrote the honest version of that argument in do I actually need a VPN; if you decide it is worth it, NordVPN is the one we recommend and the reasoning is in our full review.

Also: Libera runs a Tor onion service, which is the better answer if hiding your IP from the network operator is genuinely your threat model.

Getting on, in about ten minutes

Pick a client. In 2026 the default recommendation for a new user is Halloy, which is Rust, cross-platform, actively released, and does not look like 1997. In the terminal, WeeChat is the most actively developed IRC client in existence, with a release this month. irssi still works and still ships in Arch's installer, though its last tagged release was October 2023.

Two warnings, because these are still widely recommended and both are dead. HexChat ended development in February 2024; the maintainer's own words were that the project "has largely been unmaintained for years now and nobody else stepped up." Textual, the paid macOS client, is now archived too, with a README stating it only ever had one full-time maintainer who has moved on.

Connect over TLS. `irc.libera.chat` on port 6697.

Register your nickname. This matters more than it sounds, because many channels are set to reject unidentified users:

/nick yournick
/msg NickServ REGISTER yourpassword you@example.com
   ... then run the VERIFY command from the confirmation email

Fail to verify within about 24 hours and the account is dropped.

Set up SASL. SASL authenticates you before connection registration completes, so you are identified from the first packet, your cloak applies immediately, and account-restricted channels let you in. Libera is emphatic that SASL is not the same thing as TLS and you want both. Some IP ranges cannot connect to Libera at all without it.

Learn four commands and you are done: `/join #channel`, `/msg nick text`, `/me does something`, `/quit reason`.

Get a bouncer if you care about history. IRC has no server-side scrollback by default. Disconnect and the conversation happened without you. A bouncer stays connected and buffers. ZNC is the classic; soju is the modern one with IRCv3 history playback; The Lounge is a self-hosted web client with the bouncer built in; Ergo is a single Go binary that is an IRC server, services and bouncer at once. On mobile, Goguma is the one built for the job.

The etiquette, which is not optional

IRC channels are staffed by volunteers who have answered your question four hundred times. The norms exist for a reason and there are websites dedicated to two of them.

Don't ask to ask. Do not type "does anyone know about postgres?" and wait. Ask the actual question. There is a site called dontasktoask.com whose entire content is this point.

No hello-only messages. Do not send "hi" and then wait for someone to say hi back before describing your problem. Everyone is asynchronous. There is a site for this too, nohello.net, now translated into eighteen languages.

Use a pastebin. Never paste forty lines of log into a channel. Debian's wiki sends people to paste.debian.net specifically.

Stay on topic and be patient. From the kernelnewbies wiki, written long before anyone made a website about it: "Ask what you want to know without asking permission to ask and keep the discussion ontopic."

Why it survived

Every few years something arrives that is going to replace IRC, and mostly it does, for the projects with budgets. What is left is a protocol that runs on a socket, costs nothing to host, has no company behind it that can be acquired, and cannot show you an advertisement.

That is also the answer to why the free software world moved rather than folded when freenode was taken over. Nobody had to migrate data or negotiate an export. They ran a different server, updated a wiki page, and carried on. A protocol with no lock-in has no leverage over you, which is a property worth more now than it was in 1988.

If you like this corner of computing, the craft of ASCII art grew up in the same fixed-width, no-images environment, and pulling signals out of the air with a cheap radio scratches a very similar itch.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is IRC still used in 2026?

Yes, at about 231,000 concurrent users across the top 100 networks. Libera.Chat is the largest free software network with roughly 30,000 concurrent users and 21,000 channels, and hosts Arch, Gentoo, Ubuntu, FreeBSD and PostgreSQL. Debian and the Linux kernel newbies channel are on OFTC. It is far smaller than its 2004 peak of around ten million but it is stable and actively developed.

What happened to freenode?

Ownership passed to Andrew Lee in 2017. In May 2021 the volunteer staff resigned en masse and founded Libera.Chat; a week later freenode management seized roughly 700 channels whose topics mentioned the move. The projects left. freenode now averages about 5,218 users, down roughly 94 percent from its peak.

Does IRC show my IP address?

To the server, always. To other users, only if you are uncloaked, or if you accept a DCC transfer, or if your client fetches link previews. Registering an account on Libera gets you an automatic cloak that hides your hostmask from other users, but a cloak is cosmetic and does not hide you from the network operator. A VPN or Libera's Tor onion service moves the exposed address if that matters to you.

Which IRC client should I use in 2026?

Halloy for a modern desktop client, WeeChat for the terminal, The Lounge if you want a self-hosted web client with a bouncer built in, and Goguma on mobile. Avoid HexChat and Textual: both were officially discontinued, in February 2024 and 2026 respectively, and are still widely recommended by out-of-date guides.