linux mint comes with a program coincidentally called Hexchat for connecting to IRC networks. Are these obsolete at this point, or are there still places to hang out with people so i dont have to use discord?
IRCs are good backup news channels. The news broke about Desert Storm on IRCs way before any news outlet got a hold of any information. With how the commonly traveled internet is increasingly based on AWS/Cloudflare, having an IRC is a nice just-in-case
Yeah, I remember the first live news event that happened on IRC was when the Olympic park in Atlanta was bombed. It was crazy, a couple hundred people all putting new details into chat.
And then the media blamed that hero security guard who found the device and prevented it from killing more people. He was everything they hated, spoke with a southern accent, lived with his mother. They lied and lied and said he did it. Turned out, it was a white supremacist who spent the next couple of years hiding out in the woods and was caught raiding a dumpster for food. Good job, media.
I can’t remember if that was the real reason or that was the disinformation the media spread about the hero. That’s the problem with these lies: they stick. Most people today still think the security guard was the terrorist.
Yes, I use it for collaborating on open source code that I use for work and keeping in touch with my friends from those open source project s. Yes I know I am old. :chomsky-yes-honey:
irc is still good for piracy
yeah the only one ive ever used was one called like bookz or something like that but i ended up just using libgen instead
there are people that still use Usenet
Usenet had a huge revival for piracy to the point it’s arguably replaced a lot of private torrent trackers.
I’d say IRC is obsolete, but it is far from dead. Kinda like Doom, or e-mail. It is still one of the best places to get tech support (probably why it’s included out of the box).
Hexchat is a good client. I’ve used it since it was called X-chat.
I’ve used it since it was called X-chat.
Ah, the good old days, when people could name things like that, naively believing it would never be an issue.
In open source land, there are a lot of applications named X-something, after the X Window System which has been around in one form or another for 40 years. Nowadays, X isn’t as ubiquitous as it used to be and new applications don’t tend to be named after it unless they are designed specifically for it.
With X-Chat, the original maintainer stopped working on it at some point and the project was carried on by a new group of people, who renamed it to avoid confusion / misrepresentation.
