Where is everyone on IRC? HELLO?
Why am I here?

only 5% of network users have gnucleus, no other servent has chat. most of these 5% are just downloading, not chatting. and of the 10 to 20 people who actually joined the channel most are silent. I already submitted a post at the general gnutella section that other clients should implement chat as well, but it seems that there is no interest.

Yah I proposed to the other Gnutella client developers to use IRC to implement chat and use it to discover hosts on the network faster.

They werent too thrilled, they'd rather write their own server software for chat and discovery, which means it will never happen. Fustrating I give themaccess to a pretty good idea and a foundation that is already laid, since there are always clients in #gnutella/cache.

Fustrating, but hey, if your using gnucleus, you have one more advantage over everyone else.

ive read that discussion on the gdf and i think that the idea is simply brilliant. irc is a synonym for free speach and as long as the recording industry does not convince irc admins to close the channels it is unbreakable. IMHO 'permanent nodes' are a very poor choice as they're central entry points to a decentral network which can be shut down even if they just return ips. if that was really the only way for the network to be scalable, than it would be a very poor kind of decentral network. i much prefer the idea of having several pong caches on irc, thereby even implementing a limewire-like grouping feature. i hope you will go on with irc support, it is the way to go.

PS: Is it possible to visit other channels than #gnutella/chat and #gnutella/cache ? I had problems trying the /list command.

Yes Gnucleus is a full feature IRC client, you can join any channel. This list command takes a lot of feedback and doesnt work well. Maybe a later version I will fix this.