It's alive, but I don't know about 'doing well'. It survives among some special interest communities, but the usage is tiny compared to any of the major platforms now. You won't find your uncle on it.

To be fair, I wouldn't have found him on IRC in 1998 either. IRC has really always been a relatively niche thing and I think it's fair to say it's doing well if you define that as remaining popular within the niches it's always been associated with. Though I think this is starting to change with the popularity of Discord.

Yes Discord is starting to really starting to dominate.

More and more often these days you'll find at the bottom of a community info page a discord rather than an IRC channel. Even big pirating communities are making the switch.

How does that work? I'm a regular in the C# Discord community and one of the rules we enforce and have to enforce regularly is no illegal or shifty activity (pirating, cracking, hacking, aimbots, cheating, etc.) because the discord admins don't take kindly to that sort of thing.

Well there's obviously far too much conversation for the admins to actually snoop in on what everybody is saying so unless anybody in the group reports it then it would just fly under the radar.

If you've been to an open source conference that lasts a week the pattern is always the same: the bulk of messaging ends up on IRC.

It doesn't start out that way. First you have a lot of people pushing their favourite barrows. Then they set up IRC gateways. Then they bleed users to IRC. I've been to a few conferences that keep actual statistics of messages published, and it's always the same.

But it's well hidden. No one gives up pushing their barrow, so if you just listen to the conference gossip you would never know it's happening.

>You won't find your uncle on it.

Bug or feature?

Openness and standards matter in the end.

I sure hope so!

Afaik ICQ is still somewhat popular in eastern Europe.

ICQ’s find a friend feature got me into contact with someone in south africa (I’m from europe), who I ended up visiting for a month.

It’s the sort of random encounter / friendship that you could have in the pre-2005 internet and that’s much harder today.

I don't actually remember why ICQ died, it was the best then there was MSN Messenger for some reason...?

I think the main reason is because Windows XP included a basic MSN Messenger client enabled by default in 2001.

Indeed, ICQ was vastly superior. In fact, in my opinion, many of its features (such as the discovery features) have not been equalled since them. It was quite traumatic to me when it was replaced with MSN Messenger.

AOL bought them. Slow burn.

ICQ is now owned by the Russian company behind Mail.RU. AOL sold it for $187.5 million, less than half what they paid for it:

https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/28/aol-sells-instant-messagin...

in my circle of friends it was because aim let you pick a username instead of a number

I remember that they bloated up their client so much with menu bars, icons and later ads that it was not snappy anymore and required a lot of memory. So people where looking for alternatives.