Ircops.ch

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a text-based chat (instant messaging) system. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat and data transfer, including file sharing.

Internet Relay Chat is implemented as an application layer protocol to facilitate communication in the form of text. The chat process works on a client–server networking model. Users connect to an IRC server, which may be part of a larger IRC network. Users connect using a client, which may be a web app, a standalone desktop program, or embedded into part of a larger program. Examples of programs used to connect include Mibbit, IRCCloud, KiwiIRC, and MIRC.

IRC usage has been declining steadily since 2003, losing 60 percent of its users. In April 2011, the top 100 IRC networks served more than half a million users at a time. As of June 2021, there are 481 different IRC networks known to be operating,  of which the open source Libera Chat, founded in May 2021, has the most users, with 20,374 channels on 26 servers; between them, the top 100 IRC networks share over 100 thousand channels operating on about thousand servers.

Learn more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat

Source: wikipedia.org