To be sure, IRC is alive. I just know I've stopped using it a lot less. I make the point that I (and perhaps many of us) used to use tools everyday that were standards based, now they're not, and that's a shame. Especially true with chat clients. It's like it's 1999 again, when you needed to be on MSN IM, AOL, and Yahoo chat to reach all your friends. Then pidgin came along. What a glorious standards based time that was. It was also the time I got into IRC. Then slack came. All of a sudden the people I needed to reach were more likely on slack then IRC. I also got on mobile around that time much later than everyone else. That's when I really started using XMPP and IRC less. That's all well and good, but now where are we? GroupMe, Slack and Teams open on my laptop 24/7. Multiple chat clients. Hello, 1999. It's been a while.

My point isn't "yeah it really is dead" but "man we need to get back to those pidgin days somehow"