Are you old enough that you spent your time on IRC back in the days? Do you like your chat infrastructure free of billionaire influence? Do you have free time? Are you experiencing nostalgia? If you answered yes to one or more of the questions above, here’s what it takes to connect to the IRC network in 2025.

The IRCv3 protocol update aims to fix the (let’s be honest) awful user experience of IRC. They even have a draft for server-side chat history! Meanwhile, the Open-Source community congregates on libera.chat, and if you're looking for channels on different networks, Netsplit.de is a great resource. 

Bouncers act as a middleman between your client and the IRC server. Installed on a server, they help with keeping chat history and hiding your home IP address.

ZNC works well and is acceptably complicated to set up. The good folks at LinuxServer.io even provide a docker image. There's also Soju, an alternative written in Go but I felt lazy and didn’t try it. 

Did you know that mIRC is regularly updated (and can you imagine that a IRC software has a 4 letter .com domain)? Their licensing model hasn’t changed. It makes me happy that not all software has turned to a subscription model. If you're looking for a multi-platform client, Halloy is written in Rust. It’s a nice piece of software. I like the UI, and the icon is gorgeous.

I don't know why anyone would be on IRC in 2025, to be honest. It’s clear that IRC has a worse user experience than proprietary solutions such as Discord, Slack, or Telegram. That said, IRC is open and has a following strong enough that 30 year-old software keeps being updated and developers are building new open-source clients in memory-safe languages.

Using IRC isn’t easy, and might never be. And it’s a quiet place. But it’s free of corporate interests and sometimes I think that’s the best feature of all. And quiet is nice. 

P.S: I’m marc_in_space on libera.chat.