This is all very true but they're also a company that wants to push their API since that's where most of their stickyness comes from as a business.
IRC definitely has stability going for it but it also means it has been unable to adapt to user requirements changing over time. The most usable IRC client right now is IRCCloud which is good, but it doesn't inspire much hope because it's only usable since they completely plaster over the protocol in their UI.
In this model there's nothing special about IRC except that it's a common denominator protocol for a few networks that use it. If we were choosing a inter-network protocol I don't think anyone today would come up with IRC.
> This is all very true but they're also a company that wants to push their API since that's where most of their stickyness comes from as a business.
This is what people said about Twitter as well ;)
And slack, for instance, discontinued their IRC gateways as that limited their possibilities to "innovate" and I can image Slack, being pushed by shareholders, restricting free add-ons to getting data into slack (from Version control, business tools, task trackers, ...) but restricting getting data out to more expensive tiers (making transition of Slack harder)
But there are the key difference between open and proprietary protocols: Open protocols are slow to evolve (see also the state of mail protocols ... where innovation happens mostly in Gmail's protocols, not SMTP/imap/...) but allow wide variety of clients, while proprietary systems can evolve faster, but are more limited in clients.
Well yeah, I'm in no way saying that people in the OSS world should standardize on single company's proprietary protocol and platform and if IRC is the only thing people from two projects can agree to speak then it's what we've got.
But we really need to stop trying to make IRC 'work' and build something more usable that can interop with existing IRC networks (hi Matrix!). IRC is fundamentally not a good enough protocol for how people people chat today but it's easy for people who have been using it for 20 years and have a lot of pride and machismo sunk into figuring it to dismiss outsiders that are struggling and believe that if you pile enough barely-working brittleware on top that it can sorta-kinda work like Slack or Mattermost.
There were attempts to replace IRC with more modern (back in those days ...) architecures. For instance jabber/xmpp. But between IRC and commercial alternatives it hardly played a role. (I see more usage of commercial jabber extensions in Cisco than jabber itself these days)
IRC definitely has stability going for it but it also means it has been unable to adapt to user requirements changing over time. The most usable IRC client right now is IRCCloud which is good, but it doesn't inspire much hope because it's only usable since they completely plaster over the protocol in their UI.
In this model there's nothing special about IRC except that it's a common denominator protocol for a few networks that use it. If we were choosing a inter-network protocol I don't think anyone today would come up with IRC.