There are modern IRC clients like TheLounge and Convos that support media and video. And push messages. You can also have your own internal server not exposed to the internet, this eliminating the problems of takeover, splits and whatnot…
Also the protocol has evolved and there’s been integrated options in the servers to hide IPs for at the least a decade.
You may remember those issues and problems when you abandoned it, but it contniues to evolve and endure. I have a private server for my friends and it’s been the most stable and direct way to chat and share images for years.
Edit: I have not tested the video stuff in Convos. I use TheLounge and it’s perfectly capable of taking an mp4 to upload on the server and display it in the chat. I share images daily by uploading them from my IRC client and they are displayed in the chat… it’s not just text anymore!
I have no doubt there are improved clients. But that is the problem. IRC is not standardized at all. Different clients give different results. Also, we are talking about IRC in the 80s, not today.
That’s very far away from good usability.
Original IRC also used 8bit text, so no unicode. Note I did not say ASCII, because IRC did not even defined encodings. Do you remember the pain of different Code pages on computers?
IRC as a protocol was basically a dumpster fire that somehow worked.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved IRC (using irssi on bash mostly). But I wouldn’t praise it for usability. At all. And I would never pretend IRC set standards for usability in the 80s.
