Comment by dewey

I like IRC, and I am online all day on various servers, for nostalgia reasons mostly, but I think everyone knows it's dated, had its time and will slowly fizzle out if we like it or not.

I think the main problem there is that there's not really any motivation to build that on top of a simple protocol like IRC. The strength of the protocol is that it's distributed, easy to understand, text based and lightweight and I'd guess most current IRC users are people who use it for a very long time already.

Tucking all these mainstream features that people are used to this days to get feature parity with any other competitor (Slack / Teams / Discord / Matrix etc.) will not make IRC more popular, it will make the protocol more complicated and fragmented.