IRC Never Died

Every few years, somebody announces that IRC is dead.

Usually, the announcement comes from inside a JavaScript application that needs 800 MB of RAM to display three messages and a suspiciously animated emoji.

But IRC is not dead. It was merely waiting for the rest of the internet to remember how useful text can be.

A very short history of not disappearing

IRC — Internet Relay Chat — was born in 1988. It gave the internet channels, nicknames, operators, /join, /topic, /me, and the ability to enter a conversation without first building a personal brand.

Before feeds, followers, reactions, engagement metrics and notifications that sound like tiny emergency sirens, people joined a channel and talked.

That basic idea still works remarkably well.

A technical conversation on IRC can move at an almost suspicious speed:

1. Someone asks a question.
2. Someone else answers.
3. The first person asks a follow-up.
4. A third person pastes a log or a command.
5. Someone discovers the missing semicolon.
6. Everybody goes back to work.

No algorithm has to decide whether the question deserves visibility. No feed has to “boost” the answer. No one has to turn a debugging session into a personal-content strategy.

Text is not the poor version of a conversation. In technical communities, it is often the most efficient version.

Why IRC can be better than social media for technical work

I am not saying that IRC is better for every human activity. I am saying that, for technical discussion, it often has a much better signal-to-noise ratio than mainstream social platforms.

The conversation is immediate. The context is visible. The channel topic tells you what the room is supposed to be about. People can disagree, repair the answer, and move on without producing a 47-post thread explaining the disagreement.

There is also less ceremony.

You do not need to collect followers before asking a question. You do not need to format your message for an algorithm. You do not need to wait for a platform to decide whether your post is “engaging”.

And trolls? They still exist. IRC is not a magical troll-repellent crystal.

The difference is that IRC networks and channels usually expose more direct moderation tools. Depending on the network, you have channel operators, voice and half-operator roles, channel modes, bans, quiets, kicks, network operators, services and account controls.

The exact hierarchy varies, but the general idea is simple: moderation is close to the conversation.

That often means fewer drive-by disturbances and faster intervention than the classic social-media workflow of “report, wait, receive an automated message, wonder what just happened”.

Azzurra: the Italian starting point

If you are in Italy — or simply want to visit an Italian IRC community — Azzurra is the obvious place to look first.

Azzurra has been online since 1997 and remains one of the longest-running Italian IRC networks. It is Italian in history and atmosphere, but it is not a private club. Everybody is welcome.

The only thing worth bringing is a little patience.

Not every channel is primarily English-speaking, and not every conversation will magically switch language because one visitor arrived from another continent. Say hello, read the topic, watch the rhythm of the channel and ask politely. That is not a terrible protocol for real life either.

I would start by looking for:

• #italia, for general Italian conversation;
• #linux, for technical discussions around Linux and free software.

Check the current topic and channel availability when you connect. IRC channels evolve, sleep, wake up again and sometimes change personality without asking anybody for permission.

You can connect through the official Azzurra webchat or with any IRC client. Azzurra also presents Grappa as an independent third-party way to reach the network from a browser — useful, active, and not a replacement for the official webchat.

Libera.Chat and the international side

For a more international free-software crowd, Libera.Chat is the obvious reference point.

It hosts communities around open-source projects, programming languages, distributions, tools and documentation. You will find channels for Linux, Python, Rust, JavaScript, networking, compilers, editors and plenty of things that have never needed a venture-capital-backed emoji picker.

If neither Azzurra nor Libera.Chat feels close to your topic, search Google.

Seriously:

IRC network <your language>
IRC network <your country>
IRC <your project name>
IRC <your favourite programming language>

There are more networks and channels than any single directory can explain. Some are enormous, some are tiny, some are quiet until the exact right person appears.

That is part of the charm.

Enter the Grappa biome

The modern reboot that brought me back to this whole subject is grappa-irc, described in the origin story “grappa-irc: reinventing IRC for 2026”.

The idea is not to replace IRC with a shiny new protocol. It is to keep IRC and add the conveniences people now expect from modern software.

Grappa acts as an always-on bouncer. It stays connected to the upstream IRC network, keeps the conversation available, and exposes a modern REST and real-time interface to clients.

The web client does not need to parse raw IRC. It receives structured data, history and events through the server.

That is a surprisingly sensible boundary.

You keep the protocol, the channels and the network culture, but you get persistence, mobile access, notifications, history and a client that does not disappear every time your phone decides to save battery.

There is also an interesting AI thread in the project’s public story. The development pipeline openly describes AI-assisted sessions with a human holding the rulings, and the earlier project write-up talks about an IRC bot experiment.

The important part is the transparency.

AI here is most interesting as supervised tooling, testing and documentation support, plus clearly identified experiments. It should not become an invisible vacuum cleaner for everybody’s messages.

If you bring an LLM-powered bot to a network, read that network’s rules first. Libera.Chat’s current policy requires permission, transparency and human supervision for LLM-enabled bots. Do not drop an uninvited robot into #linux and call it community outreach.

Choose your glass

The Grappa ecosystem is becoming a small biome of clients and bridges.

• Cicchetto is the integrated web PWA. It is installable from the browser, works well on phones and keeps the IRC-shaped experience without forcing the browser to speak raw IRC.
• Shottino is the CLI counterpart, available inside the grappa-irc repository. With its IRC-server mode, old-school clients such as irssi, WeeChat or HexChat can connect to Grappa as if it were a normal IRC server.
• Resentin is a native Android client built separately with Kotlin and Compose.
• Bicchierino is an independent bridge project that exposes a stateless IRC-style facade to Grappa, useful when you want older clients to remain part of the conversation.
• Cordiale is the newest arrival: a native desktop client written in Rust with Slint. It speaks Grappa’s REST and Phoenix Channels protocol instead of IRC directly, and the project includes links to the releases, the client protocol and the Cicchetto reference.

Different clients, same general idea: keep IRC’s simplicity, then choose the interface that fits your device and your tolerance for browser tabs.

There is a channel for almost everything

IRC is not only for Linux people arguing about init systems.

You can find channels for:

• #linux;
• #ai;
• individual programming languages;
• distributions and desktop environments;
• self-hosting and system administration;
• electronics and hardware;
• art;
• literature;
• cinema;
• music;
• games;
• local communities;
• and wonderfully specific interests that would never survive a social-media recommendation engine.

Some channels are busy. Some are slow. Some are almost empty until somebody asks exactly the right question.

That is fine. IRC does not promise a constant stream of content. It offers a place where a conversation can begin.

So, is IRC back?

Maybe it never left.

It was still there while we were busy installing increasingly complicated chat applications to reproduce a room, a nickname and a scrolling list of messages.

Pick a network. Pick a client. Join a channel. Read the topic. Say hello.

Try Azzurra if you want an Italian starting point. Try Libera.Chat for international free-software communities. Search for other networks near your language or interests.

And if somebody tells you IRC is dead, send them a /me raises a glass.

The banner image was generated with AI for illustration. I am spectacularly bad at the artistic stuff, so I let the machine handle the neon, the robot and the suspiciously well-stocked bar.