Yeah, though IRC seems to have weathered the years fairly well (at least with its core audience), and it's an open and federated protocol. Since Matrix bridges

Yeah, though IRC seems to have weathered the years fairly well (at least with its core audience), and it's an open and federated protocol. Since Matrix bridges to IRC, and adds some features that you used to need IRC bouncers and such to get, and is federated itself, my (possibly naive) hope is that it can evolve into something at least akin to a "next generation" IRC with first-class support for E2E encryption and various other chat features that people tend to like these days.