It's sad that we can now, essentially, not do much more on the net than we did 20 years ago, but now it has ads and spies on you.
A few years ago, I tried to convince my colleagues (they're more designers than programmers) to use IRC for informal communication. Using IRC was (and still is) a no-brainer for me. My desktop PC runs all day, so I'm in IRC all day. But for them, joining IRC meant opening their laptops, starting their client and then pinging out 15 minutes later when their laptop went to standby.
When they were in IRC, they had this urge to really be there in IRC. I.e. monitoring it, reading everything, responding in seconds, excusing themselves when they had to go to the bathroom, and finally, finding excuses to close their IRC client again.
I have a totally different mode of operation with IRC, where it's OK to have the client open and not respond for hours or at all if you don't fell like it. I guess it's something you have to learn.
Installing BNCs solved some of the issues, but not all. Also, installing a BNC is not something your average designer-type nerd today wants to deal with.
So we ended up with KickOff for a while, but it never really worked reliably. We're now on Slack and quite happy, but I still want to try some of the various IRC "cloud" services; mainly those for self hosting.
Also, lack of addressability. IRC is primarily targeted towards channels while all the needs of current IM systems are targeted towards one-to-one messaging. Possible with IRC, but you have to jump through hoops.
I am not well aware of history of XMPP and IRC. I wonder if lack of interest in the organizations that control these protocols have lead to numerous versions of them that there are today. Slack has an IRC gateway and Facebook uses XMPP. Both of these protocols are widely used but have becomes too different from the core concept.
It's an amazing solution. So amazing, that I actually started commuting to the Quassel Android client, just because I want to give something back to this community.
For what it's worth, I agree that it's a shame that we are barely better off than we were 20 years ago, but I'm willing to accept that if it means widening the audience of the Internet for everyone. You shouldn't need a CS degree to surf the world's information.
Open program.
Automatically connect to freenode / quakenet / other major networks, sometimes even intelligently enough to try to reserve the username or users contact info nickname.
Hit a join channel button, or just get prompted the first time to name a channel.
Ommit #, it works fine. It also gives you a picker of servers, defaulting to freenode in konversations case.
Join a channel and chat.
But there is no means to notify users this exists, or how it works, or how to get on it. There is no money to be made in getting everyone on IRC.
Interestingly, Twitch uses irc in its backend to power all of the realtime chat that accompanies its streams.