The Secret of the Twitch Chat API

Wed, 08 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Have you ever been in a Twitch chat of someone with thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of chatters? The endless firehose of memes and emotes seem to come so fast that it’s almost impossible to read. Have you ever wondered what technology backs Twitch chat to support the volume and throughput of millions of concurrent chatters?

Spoilers: it’s IRC.

IRC? Really?

Yeah you know, IRC. Created in the late 80s and popularized in the 90s, I’d use it in the early 2000’s playing competitive Counter-Strike to post 5v5 | east | dust2 | cal-im | yours over and over to find people to practice against. Granted (but just as important), IRC is a protocol rather than a specific implementation, which leaves a lot of room for building efficiency. While Twitch’s servers are based on RFC1459, they only support a subset of IRC messages. In fact, to read and write chat message, we need just four commands:

Twitch on mcclain.sh

The Secret of the Twitch Chat API

IRC? Really?