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this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
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Ask Lemmy
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The small communities are still there, you just don't visit them because you are on social media (like lemmy). Forums are still there. IRC is still there. Hell, even BBS and Usenet is still there if you really want to go that way.
What is UseNet ?
Internet history. An old protocol originally for discussion, nowadays also to sail the seven seas, if you know what I mean. It predates the web by more than a decade.
Also you could go to a niche technical forum and find some of the planet's bes specialists of the material. For computing, you'd often see the people that built everything (from software to hardware). It was truly a world forum at a level that things like Twitter never got close to.
Yeah but honestly who uses Usenet anymore if not to download binaries.
Approximately the same amount of people as 30 years ago. It's only that now they are a tiny part of the internet, dwarved by TikTok and Facebook.
I would not consider Lemmy social media. Forums are few and far between, IRC is barely still kicking and Usenet (as it was) simply doesn't exist.
I was curious about Usenet awhile ago, was it still linked computers mirroring information like the old days? No, it more or less simply linked usenet providers at this point.
IRC is as active as it has always been. It was never a high throughput system, you can barely keep track of more than 5 people talking.
Forums are still kicking as well, you have car owner forums for basically any make and model, Hobby Forums, specialist Forums (house building kitchen or gardening just to name a few I consulted recently).
Yeah, they don't have the scale of Facebook, they never had.
And lemmy, reddit, Mastodon and Co are very much social media. What are they if not?
Lemmy isn't social. It's just forums aggregated. One could use it as a social app, and some people do, but it really is not necessary or even really welcomed.
I have seen estimates of a reduction of 50 to 75 percent in the number of forums over the last 15 years. There are certainly a lot less. People go to reddit or discord these days.
Same with IRC but the decline is even higher.
I'd love to see the methodology for those estimates, because I see more every year, not less. IRC stays flat.
Go look at the major irc chat hosts. Add up daily users. Then compare that number to the estimated users in 2005-10.
They are similar.
Well no they are not. Netsplit follows IRC and tracks users and IRC servers. You can watch the decline over time. Quakenet alone had nearly 200,000 monthly active user alone back in 2005.
The split of freenode, the technical abilities of people, and the lack of a easy to use mobile client all made people turn away from IRC. Factor in discord and Reddit and you lose even more.
The number of servers from 2005 to today has dropped also. From 3500 to about a thousand.
I love IRC, but it has been on a decline for a long time. Particularly if you factor in the number of online users today versus back then in general. The percentage of them that uses IRC or even knows what it is, is much smaller.
I suppose you could argue that unpublished networks, onion sites, and other IRC outside of mainstream exist, but how many users do they have?
I agree about percentage, my argument was about abosulte number of active users.
That too, the number of users is way down.
On the channels I frequent, activity seems stable, and I haven't seen numbers saying otherwise. Active users =/= connections.
There are sites that track this information or you can use the way back machine. IRC is a quarter or less of what it used to be in say 2005-2010.
That is real data.
Hard to argue if the source is "there are sites"...
I put the name of one of them in a conment. But seriously, this is basic information. You are basing your belief on not noticing. All evidence is to the contrary. Go look.
I am basing my belief on the stats of my client
You can go look at Netsplit.de for all IRC stats, and use the way back machine to compare. But the wikipedia article sums this up nicely:
And it is exactly this why it never recovered or came back. Too many other platforms that were easier to use and more mainstream. Like I said I love IRC, but most people are going to discord or something like it instead.
One client? Over what time period? This is really selective data, lol
But it's relevant, trusted and readily available...