I am a daily IRC user and I think you are exaggerating the problems. I can count on my one hand the number of times I have seen an attack on my nick or the channels I hang out in, in the last 15 years. Those attacks pass without much disruption (sometimes requiring staffer intervention). Nick squatting is solved by Nickserv these days. Splits do happen occasionally but they resolve on their own automatically without much disruption.

It is ok if it never gets adopted as mainstream communication. But for the target audience (like opensource support communities being the target audience of Libera), it works quite well.

As a daily IRC user: IRC was never reliable, but it persists still. A distributed system is easier to hurt but far harder to destroy.

in the last 20 years I have had more attacks on my email account and $whatever_current_social_network account then I had on my irc account. Things like nickserv and ip cloaks (which have been part of nearly all networks I used to connect to and those I connect to) do the job just fine. Is it easy to flood down a server, sure is, but if there's more then 1 hub on the network, things will settle pretty quickly normally.

In my opinion, the main reason why it was never adopted as a mainstream platform, is because it was never picked up by a big corp that saw a way to earn money off of it.

I don't think we can just assume that "reliable" is a globally agreed property to judge alternatives. That property is something that came about and on some level spoiled users. Because for commercial social network providers any downtime meant a loss of users, eyeballs, and most importantly money.

Uh, no, it was always usability.

Insert any modern chat app and random user can drop a screenshot there trivally, do some basic text formatting, and paste code in nicely colored blob of text, all from comfort of single login in a browser. And now even jump to voice chat or video conference directly from it.

They can also look at what they missed in channel by just scrolling up. Sending files just worked. You just got notifications without extra fuckery. Hell, you get digest with conversations you miss.

That's why modern closed down chat ecosystems won. Coz it's easy for "normies" to use.

Let's take other example, XMPP. It had all that but in network of XEPs that some clients/servers implemented, some not, some just not very well, and some being fucky to config. It wasn't just "login here and get every feature" like it is in modern chat clients.

It had it's one shining moment where both facebook and google offered XMPP way into their garden so you could have connectivity across federation and just have a single contact list but that didn't matter to non-nerds that just used facebook/google talk so once they decided to close their gardens any benefit of xmpp faded away.

And yet a large number of channels and a large number of communities migrated seamlessly to Libera and survived.

Except that the freenode takeover didn't really have much to do with IRC as such. It had to do with a domain name theft.