Supybot's successor is Limnoria: https://github.com/ProgVal/Limnoria
GitHub plugin: https://github.com/ProgVal/Supybot-plugins/tree/master/GitHu...
Btw. on the topic of bouncers, Simon Ser is developing a new one in Go: https://git.sr.ht/~emersion/soju
IRC is lacking so many critical features that people consider the fundamentals of IM now. IRCv3 has been in development for forever and they still aren't done and even if they finished it it would never make it to all the irc servers and clients.
At this point it makes sense to join most other open source projects in moving to Matrix which still has active development and the ability to actually push out new spec changes in the current decade.
I drop into IRC whenever I need help with an Arduino project or want to catchup with old colleagues. From my own personal experience, all the open source communities I get involved with use IRC and I have never known one use Matrix, sometimes this is for personal reasons and sometimes for work. This probably depends on what techie circles you move in.
I've also noticed IRC is more popular in certain countries. Anecdotally Brazil and Sweden seem to have fairly large communities of nontechnical people on IRC.
Maybe for some people, IRC does what they want and they don't need any updated spec.
mIRC is what got me into programming, actually... I miss the good old days
[2] https://www.cygwin.com/packages/summary/weechat.html
[3] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10
I don't want to be a part of this.
Nevertheless, thank you for bringing these up!
Yes IRC has an impressive list of servers, clients and networks built up over the last 3-4 decades.
Outside the major hubs (freenode) and FOSS channels though, actual usage seems to be going down.
IRC is no longer the “default” for chat, like it used to be.
And I say that as someone heavily invested in IRC, operating an IRC-network for almost 2 decades.
that said, none of the newer alternatives are any better unfortunately.
it seems jabber really was the only federated system with any moderate success, and maybe matrix is getting there too with its ability to integrate different services.
but that's not the issue. the issue is that i can't maintain a global identity, and that i have to add each network into any configuration instead of just sending a message to anyone on any network without creating an identity on that network (even if it's just picking a nickname).
some of this could be worked around in the client if the client has an uptodate list of irc networks so that sending a message to embee@freenode would automatically connect your client to freenode, make you pick a nickname and send the message.
hmm, that's an interresting thought experiment.
how could this be made seamless without inviting spam.
On AmigaOS, amirc (which many clients cloned the UI of) and wookiechat.
Even kolibriOS ships an irc client.
It's a nice, simple protocol that's human readable and imposes very little overhead on the clients.
With Bitlbee and sacc(1) I can access even HN via Gopher and comment it on Telegram via sic(1). Magical and my setup could work even under a 286 with Minix2.
The next is very OP.
You can connect with SSL and optionally SASL (as well as cloaking your IP) but this is encrypted to the server. Most of IRC is public anyway though so E2E doesn't make total sense.
IRC is no longer difficult to use; there are great software applications across nearly every device that can be named which can work with and present the RFC1459 protocol splendidly, including weechat [11], KiwiIRC [12], Textual [13], Palaver [14], to mIRC [15], and AdiIRC [16], among others!
IRC has bots hosted by the community that can hook into github like bitbot [17] and supybot [18] among others.
You can also stay connected to IRC using an IRC bouncer like KiwiBNC [19], znc [20], IRCCloud [21], Quassel [22], Bitlbee [23] or shamlessplug jbnc [24].
[1] https://freenode.net
[2] https://oftc.net
[3] https://rizon.net
[4] https://www.dal.net
[5] https://tildeverse.org
[6] https://snoonet.org/
[7] https://quakenet.org/
[8] https://efnet.org
[9] https://ircnet.com
[10] https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php
[11] https://weechat.org/
[12] https://kiwiirc.com
[13] https://codeux.com/textual
[14] https://palaverapp.com/
[15] https://mirc.com/
[16] https://adiirc.com/
[17] https://github.com/jesopo/bitbot
[18] https://github.com/Supybot/Supybot
[19] https://kiwiirc.com/
[20] https://znc.in
[21] https://irccloud.com/
[22] https://quassel-irc.org/
[23] https://www.bitlbee.org/
[24] https://github.com/realrasengan/jbnc
Edit: Added a few that I accidentally left out. Thank you all! If I left anyone else out I apologize - IRC is so decentralized, spread out, and... alive... that it's hard to name all of the amazing projects, networks and implementations out there!