Discord seems to be taking over from IRC honestly, I used to be heavy into IRC but it's been fairly dead (most of the servers/channels I would frequent are dried up or closed up).  I don't use discord but know a lot of devs do.  Twitter is another method some people use but not so good for group chats.

Fairly certain gamedev.net has a discord channel.

52 minutes ago, Mike2343 said:

Fairly certain gamedev.net has a discord channel.

There's a link up the top  https://www.gamedev.net/community/chat/

For IRC I recommend you download one of the many clients (e.g. HexChat, mIRC, etc.) and just dabble around with it. See if you like it. There are a few skills to learn:

In most clients you can join a server by typing "/server irc.freenode.net" for example. To join channels you would type "/join #blender". To leave channels, you type "/part" and to disconnect you would type "/quit". There are a few other commands, such as sending private messages to specific users. This is done with "/msg <username> <message>". Note that most clients allow you to autocomplete usernames by pressing TAB.

To find out more information about a user, you can type "/whois <username>".

Then, a lot of IRC servers provide "services", which are bots that assist in channel/user management. Probably the most used one is NickServ, which allows you to register your name so no one can steal and impersonate you. You can interact with it by sending PMs, i.e. try "/msg NickServ HELP". There's also a service called "ChanServ", to see what it does, you may type "/msg ChanServ HELP".

And now, for my more controversial opinions:

IRC is old and stupid and lacks features in many ways. For example, mesasge history is only recorded while you are joined to channels. While you're offline, there is no way for you to see any messages that were sent during that period. People could be talking trash about you and you'd never know. The IRC protocol does not expose any functionality to synchronize past messages with your client upon joining. People get around this by writing their own chatbot or paying an online service to keep your username online when you go offline.

Most IRC clients are text based. They do not support embedded videos or gifs. They do not support avatars, message IDs, or anything advanced at all, really. Most additional functionality like this is provided by bots written by people who have no hobbies.

You will also notice a distinct "smell" when you enter any IRC channel on the internet. The way people talk and behave can be off-putting and strange and it's unique to IRC people. It's caused by a mixture of elitism, hipster-ism, and a resistance to change. IRC people will insist that you don't need any of those advanced features listed above. They will say things like "who needs message history, heh". Notice the "heh" proceeding this sentence. It's small quirks like this that you may not even notice at the beginning, but are indications of this "shared IRC consciousness", as if all people have merged into a single, indisginguishable personality blob. A hivemind. It's very hard to describe. It's the same smell you get from people who compile BSD from source and install it onto 1980's hardware and feel the need to brag about their accomplishments. It's the same smell you get from hipsters who go to hacker conventions with their macbook pros, who buy an Arduino-powered LED blinking hardware kit they get to solder together themselves and then feel like they need to brag about how much of a hacker they are, even though they don't know how to program and they probably botched all of the solder joints.

Because joining an IRC channel is an achievement in itself. It requires some investement to learn how to use it, and because of this, it attracts people who with needs to feel superior to others.

For these reasons, I recommend using Discord or anything else. Only use IRC in cases where you really have to (like asking a specific code question about the CPython API or something).

TheComet summed it up quite well. I think if you search deeply enough you'll find that IRC isnt 'dead' so much as the non-technical have left it. It is purely a place for geeks and programmers to hang out now.

I've been on IRC since 1998, and going back to 1998 it was full of "chat" channels like #cybercafe, full of non-technical people. Most of these have now moved on to social networks and discord etc.

I've found that discord is "ok", but kind of limiting for my needs - it's really a place for gamers not developers. I can see it being of great use to build a community of players for the games you make, but for your developers to chat? IRC can be secured on a private server behind a firewall, and you don't need to worry about yet another cloud service retaining logs of your private discussions.

For business use this can be kind of important, but i'm probably the wrong person to ask as i'm very pro-IRC and still clinging to its dying shell, i'll be there on IRC when i'm the last person left.

For reference, i'm still running the network I created back in 2001, which at its peak had 4000 users (back when WarCry and Escapist magazine had their IRC channel there, and they briefly hosted a WoW developer chat, the servers creaked under the strain!) - now it's just chugging along at 400 users, the same 400 users it's had for years and is still running the irc daemon software I created  that is now amongst the most popular irc daemon software out there. Take my opinion as an old grizzled IRC admin with a pinch of salt, but if you nee advice about setting up an IRC network of your own for private use, PM me and i'll be glad to help! :-)

@TheComet You forgot to mention no quotes around any of the commands, ran across people having issues with this in the past so thought I would mention it.

@Brian That is awesome, I started around 1997 on Undernet, ended up running #Partyhouse for about 5 years.

IRC is a useful skill to have as a developer, whether or not you use it as a primary chat platform. In particular, even at the big enterprises I've worked (Amazon and Facebook), IRC is still the backup communication system in cases where the more user-friendly chat platforms go south.

It's not that hard to setup an IRC server that will run without issues for years on end. Modern platforms like Discord offer somewhat... lower availability