I was able to have literally months of logs from a dozen servers streamed to a single app running with 1/256th the memory I have in the laptop I'm writing on, and it was both more responsive and had more features. And you didn't need to deal with anyone's custom emoticons or gif spam. That is a serious loss from my perspective.

Hell, just today I was trying to figure out how to use native emoji in Discord. Turns out, you can't, and they just force you to deal with those god-awful cartoony ones. Ugh. One day someone will come back around and reimplement basic text chat as a "minimal", "sleek", or "uncluttered" experience and we'll come full-circle. Maybe it'll even use XMPP this time....