The number of chat and discussion services competing for our attention is growing at a bewildering pace. Take a typical smartphone and its methods for communication: It'll probably have SMS, Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts, WhatsApp, and Telegram. Then, add a few phone-specific services on top. Every other day a new app arrives promising to be the ultimate solution for all of our communication woes – but it just becomes another annoyance filling the notification bar.

And there's another problem: Most of these services are proprietary and centralized. If WhatsApp's servers go down (unlikely, as they're running on FreeBSD), then there's nothing that the service's vast user base can do. Well, apart from enjoying a few moments of peace and quiet, of course. The Internet was created as a distributed network that could route around problems, yet we're increasingly reliant on highly centralized services run by single companies. It's not how things were meant to be.

So, in this article, I'll examine the state of Internet Relay Chat (IRC). This is an open protocol for real-time, text-based communication that is older than the web, and most importantly, it's decentralized. Anyone can run IRC server software, and it's possible to add multiple computers to the same IRC server to create a network, providing backups in multiple locations in case one machine happens to go down. IRC may not offer all the fancy bells and whistles of other communication services, but it's proven, reliable, and still widely used – especially in the free and open source software community.

[...]