I made a graphical IRC client that runs in UEFI. It’s written in Rust and leverages the GUI toolkit and TrueType renderer that I wrote for axle’s userspace. I was able to develop it thanks to the vmnet network backend that I implemented for QEMU. You can connect to an IRC server, chat and read messages, all from the comfort of your motherboard’s pre-boot environment. “Why”? What kind of question is “why”?

A robust, full-featured, and user/programmer-friendly Python IRC bot, with many existing plugins. - progval/Limnoria

One interacts with IRC through an IRC client. There are many well-established IRC clients and countless more that exist as hobbyist projects. This page exists as an opinionated list of clients recommended by Libera.Chat staff for newcomers to IRC. These are free, open-source, and have maintainers who can respond to potential security issues.

This is a celebration of the weird, raw, chaotic brilliance of IRC. Every quote is a fragment of internet history — awkward, hilarious, painful, or profoundly stupid. We love it all.

This bitlbee setting is such a match made in heaven for rcirc’s various ways to send multiple lines at once.

There is some merit to concerns about the culture on Stack Exchange. Just like on Wikipedia, you can run into some rando småpåve who thinks they’re the king of the world and tries to put you in your place while they’re the one who’s being all wrong about something.

It sucks when that happens, but overall I think Wikipedia and especially Stack Exchange have been successes, especially in the context of the ephemerality of Usenet and IRC.