IRC has only about 400,000 users left

IRC is the abbreviation of Internet Relay Chat, which is generally called Internet Relay Chat in Chinese. It is an Internet chat protocol first created by the Finn Jarkko Oikarinen in 1988. After ten years of development, more than 60 countries in the world now provide IRC services. The working principle of IRC is very simple. You just need to run the client software on your PC and then connect to an IRC server through the Internet using the IRC protocol. It is characterized by very fast speed, almost no delay during chatting, and only takes up very little bandwidth resources. All users can talk or have secret conversations on a certain topic in a place called a "Channel". Every IRC user has a Nickname.

This old text-based communication method has been impacted by new communication methods such as social networks and IM, and now has few users. In 2003, when IRC was at its peak, it had more than 1 million users and 500,000 channels. Today, the number of users is only 400,000, and the number of channels is only half of that. It is mainly used by open source organizations and software developers.