I’ve wanted to get back on IRC for a while but don’t really know where people live in it these days. Are there any specific channels/servers that are still popular where I can start?
I also tried to "get back" on IRC a couple of times but even on Libera pretty much everyone is idling and nobody seems to actually use it aside from having a client sit there "just in case".
In practice Discord seems to be where everyone is nowadays and while Discord is little more than a proprietary IRC with built-in history and images, people are active there. It basically feels the same as when i used mIRC back in the 90s and early 2000s - including the part where some channels/servers were so full of people i could barely keep up. If anything it is more than i ever saw on IRC as i am in 25 "servers"[0] with various channels in each (though like with IRC i only participate in a handful of them and i only occasionally browse the rest).
Fortunately Discord works via the web and i have the web interface pinned on Firefox all the time so i don't have to use their client.
[0] i really dislike the name as they aren't really servers, just groups of channels - everything is on Discord's proprietary server
It's been three years for me. Last time it was in Freenode, but there was some drama more recently and if I'm not mistaken, people migrated to a new net called libera.chat.
Chanels, depending on what you're looking for, but there used to be a lot of them, just look number of users.
The Zig team seems to use IRC. I was in there a few times and was able to discuss things with the key team members directly. The fact not a lot of people are on IRC these days probably allows them to let anyone join in :D.
