Comment by ddevault

To add to this: I think IRC strikes an interesting balance between async and sync conversations -- Schrödinger's synchronization, in a sense. In public conversations, there's no expectation that anyone will be present for anything and no expectation that they should read the things they missed, which is good. However, among mutual bouncer users there's a culture of sending messages you expect to be read later, in their own time. We essentially get the best of both worlds.

I wrote a little bit about this facet of IRC culture in this article:

https://drewdevault.com/2021/11/24/A-philosophy-for-instant-...