I mean, that wasn't entirely a serious comment

IRC is a good example of how internet technology used to work; people would propose standards that anyone could implement. It's a niche today, but when has it ever not been a niche? Like, even when chat rooms were more mainstream it was usually stuff like the AOL chatrooms.

I think a thing that's killing IRC these days is mobile; mobile IRC on the same convenient level of say, Discord, is a much more complicated experience because of the ways bouncers and clients have traditionally been designed, and how the server handles state. And the reputation is that younger people prefer to do most of their computing on phones rather than desktops... command lines are nice as long as you're not typing it in using a touch keyboard.

I mean, I used to have Colloquy on my iPhone for IRC hooked up with my bouncer, but it was still a rougher experience than I'd like-- I had to log in, the whole backlog would show up without it being obvious which were new (the other option would be to not have the ones that were old, which made it harder to do a quick check as message would be lost forever)... the Discord mobile experience is much cleaner. I could take a look at Mutter, though...