You Should Run an IRC Server
In 1995 I was nineteen years old. I had just learned what the internet was. Within about a week of that, I learned what IRC (Internet Relay Chat) was. I don’t think it’s possible to explain to someone who grew up with social media just how wild it felt to type something into a chat window and have a person in another country type something back. In real time. For free. It sounds quaint now, like telling someone you were amazed by a light switch. But it was electric.
Here’s what IRC was: a protocol. Open, documented, and free. You connected to a server, you joined a channel, and you talked to people. Messages appeared in the order they were sent, and everyone in the channel saw the same thing. You could run your own server if you wanted to. You could write your own client. You could write bots. The whole system was transparent and simple in a way that felt like it trusted you. It assumed you were a person who wanted to talk to other people, and it got out of the way and let you do that.
I ended up spending most of my time on the #ToriAmos channel, which is funny because I was only sort of a Tori Amos fan. I mean, I liked a few of her songs. But the people in that channel were smart and weird and funny, and I kept showing up for them, not for discourse about Boys For Pele. We talked about everything. Music, sure, but also books, relationships, dumb jokes, serious problems. The kind of stuff you talk about with friends.
And that’s what they became. Friends. Real ones. Eventually we all met up in person to see Tori play at the Wang Center in Boston. I remember being struck by how normal it felt, like I already knew these people, because I did already know these people. We’d been talking for months. The medium was text in a chat window, but the relationships were real. There was one girl I kind of fell for, only to find out later she was a lesbian. A lesbian Tori Amos fan. I know. The mind reels.
I think about that a lot lately. Not out of nostalgia, exactly, but because nothing I’ve used since has worked that well for that purpose, and I’ve tried quite a few things.
And now most people use Discord.
Discord took the soul of IRC, ripped it out, and put a shiny, frictionless, corporate engagement machine in its place. And everyone signed up. I signed up. I had to. That’s where everyone else was.
I don’t think I need to explain to most people reading this that Discord is bad. But I want to be specific about how it’s bad, because “DISCORD BAD” has become one of those opinions people nod along with and then keep using it anyway. The problem isn’t that Discord is ugly or that it crashes sometimes or that the search is lousy (though all of those things are true). The problem is structural.
Discord is a closed platform that owns your community. You don’t run a Discord server. You run a Discord server on Discord. The distinction matters. Discord can (and does) change the rules whenever they want. They can shut down your server. They can read your messages. They can and do sell access to the behavioral patterns of your users.
Your “server” is a row in their database. You have no meaningful control over it, and the moment Discord decides your community isn’t profitable or is too much of a liability, it’s gone. You can’t back it up. You can’t export it. You can’t move it somewhere else. It’s just gone.
And that’s the optimistic scenario where Discord stays in business, which is not a given. Discord has never turned a profit. They’ve been trying to figure out how to monetize a platform that people chose specifically because it was free and relatively unobtrusive. Every year the ads get pushier, the Nitro upsells get more aggressive, and the “suggested” content gets harder to dismiss. (I still don’t know why anyone pays for Nitro. Animated avatars and bigger file uploads? For ten dollars a month?) This is the trajectory of every venture-funded platform. They spend years getting you hooked, then they spend years extracting value from the hook. We’ve seen this movie before. We are, in fact, watching several versions of it play out simultaneously right now.
But let’s say none of that bothers you. Let’s say you don’t care that Discord owns your community, that they’re data-mining your conversations, that the platform will inevitably enshittify further. There’s still the matter of what Discord does to the conversations themselves.
Discord is designed to maximize engagement, which is a polite word for “time spent looking at Discord.” The notification system is tuned to pull you back constantly. The emoji reaction system turns every message into a tiny popularity contest. Channels proliferate until nobody can find anything and half of them are dead. And the whole thing is wrapped in a UI that’s designed to feel like a video game, because the people who built it were building a product for gamers and never really moved past that, even as they tried to become a general-purpose communication platform.
The result is a place where it’s very easy to talk and very hard to communicate. Which, if you think about it, is the defining characteristic of almost every major communication platform built in the last fifteen years.
(We’re not even going to talk about Slack. Slack is just how corporate America talks to itself and keeps the workers in line. It deserves its own piece, but not this one.)
Social media “groups” are worse, somehow. Facebook Groups, Reddit’s chat feature, Twitter/X (TwiX?) communities, whatever Telegram and WhatsApp groups have become. These are communication tools bolted onto platforms whose primary purpose is something else entirely. The algorithm doesn’t stop at the group boundary. It decides what you see, when you see it, and in what order. Members of the same group can have completely different experiences of what’s happening in that group, because the platform is curating their feeds based on what will keep them engaged, not what will keep the group coherent.
This is the bubble problem, and it operates at a level most people don’t think about. You don’t just end up in a political bubble or an interest bubble. You end up in a conversational bubble where you literally aren’t seeing the same messages as the person you’re supposedly talking to. The platform is between you, interpreting, filtering, and rearranging. It’s like having a conversation through a translator who’s also trying to sell you sneakers.
You’ve heard me talking about what IRC was, but that implies it doesn’t exist anymore. It does. IRC is. It’s still around, it’s still actively developed, and if anything it’s better and easier to use now than it was when I was nineteen and fumbling around with mIRC on a Pentium. And using ACDSee to look at…images.
IRC is almost aggressively simple. You connect to a server. You join a channel. Messages appear in the order they were sent. Everyone in the channel sees the same messages. There’s no algorithm. There’s no “suggested channels” or “you might also like.” There are no emoji reactions. There’s just text, in order, from people.
I can already hear the objection: “But IRC is old and janky and hard to use and there’s no media embedding and you can’t search and there’s no mobile app and…”
Some of that is true. Most of it isn’t.
As a user… sorry, as a member of the community (when did we all become “users”?), getting on IRC is not hard. You install a client. It’s no more difficult than installing the Discord client, and you don’t have to watch their stupid logo spin for twenty minutes after you do it. There are clients for every operating system. HexChat and irssi if you’re on a desktop. IRCCloud or The Lounge if you want something web-based. Palaver or Revolution IRC on mobile. Hell, mIRC is still alive and kicking. You pick one, you connect, you join a channel. That’s it. You’re talking to people.
Media embedding isn’t built in, and I’d argue that’s a feature, not a bug. You share a link. People click it if they want to. Nobody’s auto-playing video in the middle of your conversation.
File transfer isn’t really baked in either. Most clients had (have?) something called DCC, which worked by establishing a direct connection between two users and then transferring the file at a speed that can only be described as geological. And that’s if it worked at all, which it usually didn’t, because the second a firewall or NAT got involved the whole thing just silently gave up. In practice, you’d paste a link to the file hosted somewhere else, which is what everyone does on every platform anyway.
There’s no search to speak of, but it’s arguable that no search at all is better than the war crime Discord calls search. If you’re running your own server, you can log channels and search those logs however you want. I used to grep my logs. It was faster than Discord search, honestly.
Okay, so DISCORD BAD. What do we do about this, kids? That’s right. We run our own servers.
There is something genuinely different about a communication platform that you control. Not “you” as in “you’re the admin of a Discord server and you can ban people and set roles.” You as in “the software runs on a machine you have root access to, and the data stays where you put it, and if you want to change how something works, you can.”
Setting up an IRC server in 2026 is not hard. InspIRCd and UnrealIRCd are both actively maintained, well-documented, and free. You can have one running on a cheap VPS in an afternoon. TLS is straightforward to configure. You can set up services (NickServ, ChanServ) for user and channel registration. You can write bots in whatever language you want because the IRC protocol is simple and well-documented.
The cost is trivial. Five or ten dollars a month for a VPS. Maybe a few hours of setup. After that, maintenance is minimal unless you’re doing something exotic.
And what you get for that is yours. Your community lives on your machine. Your conversations are stored (or not stored) according to your rules. Nobody is mining your members’ data. Nobody is going to inject ads into your channels. Nobody is going to change the terms of service on you. If you want to shut it down, you shut it down. If you want to move it, you move it. If you want to modify the server software, the source code is right there.
That said, IRC has real limitations. File sharing is clunky. Voice and video aren’t part of the protocol (though you can pair it with something like Mumble or Jitsi if you need that). The barrier to entry for non-technical users is higher than Discord’s, though not as high as people think.
But the thing IRC gets right is the thing that matters most, and it’s the thing that every modern platform gets wrong: it doesn’t have an agenda. IRC is a protocol, not a product. Nobody is trying to maximize your engagement. Nobody is trying to convert your attention into revenue. It just moves text from one place to another. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
I think there’s a growing number of people who are tired. Tired of platforms that treat their conversations as raw material. Tired of algorithmic feeds that decide what they should care about. Tired of building communities on land they don’t own. If you’re one of those people, I’m not going to tell you IRC is the answer to everything. It isn’t. But it might be the answer to this specific thing, which is: how do I talk to the people I want to talk to without a corporation sitting in the middle, listening in, and trying to figure out how to make money off of it?
That’s not a small thing. It might be the whole thing.