Yeah, sorry, I guess I just don't get this animosity towards a protocol that, to me, still has a bunch of upsides over other alternatives that actually have a userbase (again, userbase that's relevant to me). IRC and the associated ecosystem might be ancient but it feels like it adopts (slowly but surely) and puts me more in control than the weird commercial alternatives that crop up every few years. With the added bonus of still running after decades instead of going under and burrying my data (or putting workload on me).
The network architecture was ridiculous 20 years ago, it still works. That's one of those things where I feel like "cool, if it's really broken enough, write a new backend and maintain compatbility to my stuff. I'm a user and don't care about your architecture". I'll gladly admit that there's a non-trivial amount of nostalgia in that logic though. :)
