NickServ is not part of IRC. It's just a bot that people wrote to overcome one of the key shortcomings of IRC, and is used at the discretion of individual serve

NickServ is not part of IRC. It's just a bot that people wrote to overcome one of the key shortcomings of IRC, and is used at the discretion of individual server administrators. IRC itself has literally no way to verify users, and more importantly no _opinion_ on how you should verify them. Sure, people have written bots/services that have become part of some server packages' standing offering (chanserv, nickserv, opserv, etc.) but there's no spec for them, every server's implemention has (sometimes wildly) different command sets, and as effectively text-scroll CLI, they don't actually make things all that much easier. They're a chore to use. And I say that as an IRCop. IRC as a platform is insufficient in today's world, so if you're going to spend a lot of time either finding -- or more likely, making -- services to take care of all the administrative tasks that IRC itself does not cover, you might as well just go one step further and go "you know what? IRC isn't sacred, if we're spending time and money on trying to make it usable in 2019, then how we instead spend that same time and money on finding a good solution to the problem we're having, rather than sticking with IRC for no good reason".