Ask HN: What Is the Future of the Internet Relay Chat Protocol?

Honestly I've just re-adopted IRC.

Instant Messengers like Google Talk, and Group Chat apps like Slack come and go along with their walled gardens, but IRC just keeps on keeping on.

As far as I can tell IRC has stopped evolving; it has no provisions for people not always being connected, it has no answer to mobile, it has nothing for threaded conversations, it has nothing for video chat, it has no searchable scrollback.

IRC is legacy tech that kind of sucks, but all improvement has been done by startups rather than open source developers, so we have a fragmented mess. I mean, XMPP exists, but it's not that great either.

It turns out UX is more important than whether you need to convince people to install a new piece of software for the vast majority of people.

IRC is one of the things that I still use very frequently. If only the planet had a way to make it immune to DDoS attacks from angry people, though.