Similar to mailing lists, IRC might be less mainstream but is still heavily used in niches, i.e. for development and support of open source projects. The simpli

Similar to mailing lists, IRC might be less mainstream but is still heavily used in niches, i.e. for development and support of open source projects. The simplicity of the protocol makes it easy to use for automation (bots), i.e. CI servers or similar. I've also seen networks dedicated to file sharing.