The idea has been replicated in XMPP as so-called transports, which maps other protocols to XMPP. This arguably works better than bitlbee and other IRC gateways

The idea has been replicated in XMPP as so-called transports, which maps other protocols to XMPP. This arguably works better than bitlbee and other IRC gateways, since XMPP is a superset of many protocols, while IRC is a subset of many protocols. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP#Connecting_to_other_protocols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP#Connecting_to_other_proto... I can join chatrooms in my XMPP client by joining a multi-user chat, like maemo%irc.freenode.net@irc.netlab.cz. It may seem useless at first, but I have found out that when on a train and using IRC directly, I timeout much more often than if using XMPP in the same situation.