Or: why IRC?
IRC has been around almost as long as the internet, beginning its life in 1988.
The system saw widespread popularity in the 90s and 2000s, but fell off in the 2010s as services such as Discord, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram were released and adopted by users.
Which begs the question: why use IRC in this day and age?
There are a few reasons for this. First, IRC as a service is not centralised. While people own IRC servers, nobody owns IRC as a system itself so nobody can enforce who can use it or what they can use it for. This means you can’t be disallowed from participation based on your values, what you say or who you are. While this may be a double edged sword, when the decision to exclude is in the hands of corporations, our ability to maintain connections to one another becomes precarious.
Which brings us to point two: redundancy.
In the early days of the internet, users connected to one another directly as well as via a multitude of smaller hubs, such as websites and servers. As the internet has matured, these have slowly been replaced by fewer, larger entities which are most often owned by corporate entities.
When people are connected either directly or via smaller, more numerous hubs, this creates a level of redundancy which allows us to remain connected if something were to happen to a hub or our ability to access it.
In many cases, people are connected via a single hub, for example Facebook. This gives these platforms an enormous level of control over our ability to be linked to one another.
There is no real requirement for these platforms to act ethically in their dealings, so it is entirely possible for them to arbitrarily remove people. When this happens, individuals often suffer a loss of connections or even isolation from one another.
We have long since begun using the Internet as an institution of communication, yet despite this there is precious little regulation around the ways in which these platforms are allowed to censor or ban people.
IRC circumvents this by providing people with non-proprietary protocols for communicating. This means (beyond server-specific ops) no party can forcefully block individuals from communicating online, or to gatekeep the people who are permitted to do so.
This server was set up using UnrealIRCD with Anope IRC Services. Both of these are fully open source and have no ties to any corporate entity whatsoever.
In a world where how we speak to one another is becoming increasingly at the good-will (or lack thereof) of corporations, it is dreadfully important that we continue to preserve and maintain these decentralised and non-proprietary methods of communication.
If you choose not to use this server, you can find the “parts” that built it below and use them to make your own: