IRC technology news from the second half of 2020

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2021-05-30 17:30:10

In this article we look at the happenings in the IRC ecosystem during the second half of 2020. The great number of active software projects demonstrates a broad interest in specifying and implementing modern IRC standards.

The article was written in January 2021 and was supposed to be published somewhere else, but due to delays I decided to create this blog site to finally get it out.

It seems that the pandemic of 2020 with its influence on remote work and communication also had an impact on the interest in IRC. During the research phase of this article, it became clear that many were dusting off their old IRC projects and making them run on the latest software stacks. Numerous new projects had also entered development. For every active project included in this article, several others were left out due to being clearly personal, too young or still experimental.

From the perspective of the free and open source software community, the biggest news was freenode and OFTC staff collaborating on an IRCd called Solanum. Solanum is a fork of Charybdis, which has now been archived. For years, freenode has been using IRCd-Seven, which is based on Charybdis. OFTC has been using a modified version of Hybrid IRCd (still actively developed).