IRC is Cool

November 26th, 2025

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is an instant messaging protocol created in 1988. It was essentially the first instant messager to be created for use on the internet. Despite it's age, it is still in use today in 2025. Applications like Discord take a lot of inspiration from IRC, for example, it's #channel structure.

Being as young as I am, I have no experience with using IRC during it's golden ages in the 90's and early 2000's. I'm a complete IRC newgen. Despite this, I have become pretty fond of it and even come to prefer it over more popular messengers like Discord.

The thing I like the most about IRC is that everything is plaintext. That means no images, gifs, profile pictures, or even really emojis of any kind. At first that sounds terrible to any modern Discord user. However, I can tell you it's not as bad as it sounds. When you talk to someone in real life, you have no images, gifs, emojis, and social profiles. You just have a voice (hopefully). Maybe you know the experience of joining a popular Discord (or similar) server and finding that everyone is just spamming silly gifs of cats sticking their tongues out or maybe anime girls. No one really seems to talk about anything. When you don't have anything to say, you can just compensate by sending something funny from your computer or camera roll instead. Don't get me wrong, that stuff is funny but it often replaces normal authentic communication.

IRC isn't like this. If you don't have anything to say, your only option is to just not talk or to think of something to say. This is much more similar to real life. In a conversation with friends at school or work, you can't just whip out a video mid convo to get them to laugh, you actually have to be creative enough to think of something funny to say.

As a consequence of this, I have found that a lot of IRC chatrooms and the people in them offer a wealth of information about a wide variety of topics (especially technology related ones). When you think about it actually makes a lot of sense that this protocol has survived this long even in the face of polished modern messengers. In addition, you will find people of all ages there including many gen z'ers like myself.

There are a variety of other reasons to use IRC as well.

• Its free and decentralized. No one person or group controls IRC.
• It can be used on literally any computer because it's so lightweight.
• It doesn't require a signup/profile, you can just join and talk.
• You can use a wide variety of applications to talk on IRC
• It's a lot of fun.