Now you may be thinking; “That chat program is still around?” or “What the heck is a eye-arr-see?”

Well let me tell you my friend. It stands for Internet Relay Chat and it’s been around for 34 years. It’s pretty much perfected at this point and quite easy to use if you have even the slightest technical knowledge.

So IRC servers are separate from one another with each server having it’s own admins. Each server you connect to has it’s own bots ran by individuals to messages and ask for things.

IRC servers work by sending slash commands much like discord does. To message another user you might type /msg coolboot2000 hello world! Piracy on IRC works by sending a bot a pm with the pack number you want.

“Where do I find servers and bots and pack numbers?” It’s as easy as using a xdcc search engine. http://sunxdcc.com/ has both a search and a list of networks. (DCC is Direct Client to Client meaning no files pass thru the server and XDCC is a version of DCC that allows large files to be transferred.)

“How do I connect?” You use an IRC client with SSL support. mIRC for windows and Hexchat with a patch for Linux. Once installed you can use the slash command /connect or use the clients GUI buttons to make a connection to the server.

“How do I make my own IRC client?” Follow the specifications here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_Relay_Chat_commands There are a ton of pre-made IRC libraries for pretty much every programming language.

Best luck friends!

    • 9tr6gyp3@lemmy.world
      3·
      11 months ago

      There is the default matrix.org server you can join.

      There are others out there as well. https://joinmatrix.org/servers

      You can also create your own server if you’d like. Servers are federated, so you’ll be able to communicate with any/all of them (as long as you follow the rules of each one)

      You can search for chat rooms in the app. You’ll easily find all the rooms hosted on your server, but you can also join chats on other servers.

        • 9tr6gyp3@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          11 months ago

          Honestly, not sure how well the piracy experience is on Matrix. I’m not a pirate myself, but I imagine it would work fine if it was smaller files. You could make a separate thread per item.

          There is probably an upload size limit on the server though. As far as I know, you can’t transfer files peer to peer.

            • 9tr6gyp3@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              11 months ago

              I can’t vouch for any since I have no skin in the game. I did a quick room search and found quite a few “piracy” rooms. No idea who or what is going on in each of them though.

    • can@lemmy.caEnglish
      3·
      11 months ago

      It’s what lemmy recommends for private messages since admins can see lemmy DMs. A lot of instances have matrix rooms too.

    • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org
      41·
      11 months ago

      https://joinmatrix.org should have answers to most of your questions.

      If you read the site carefully it will make you set up key backup, but please for the love of god, do set up key backup asap after registration! Without it, it is so easy to lose access to all your former encrypted messages, and you will be very disappointed when that happens.