Chatting on IRC in 2025: grandpa, what's up?

IRC is a venerable 37 year old chat protocol used by many open-source software projects, technical experts happily lending their help and other discussion groups. However, the historic IRC protocol is not always well-suited to modern usage, such as connecting from multiple devices with unreliable connectivity, or connecting from battery-constrained mobile devices.

In this talk, Simon and Thomas will explain how IRC has evolved in the last few years to address these challenges through efforts like the IRCv3 working group and new software (soju, senpai, gamja, goguma). We've been working on adding new features such as easily accessing message history, sharing files and pictures and searching through messages. Some of the architectural design decisions may be interesting to people working on other open protocols, for instance secure and interoperable push notifications or OAuth integration.