That's too bad. Personally I dislike this trend towards a plurality of chat "services" and "apps." Now each project I interact with has their own chat service.

That's too bad. Personally I dislike this trend towards a plurality of chat "services" and "apps." Now each project I interact with has their own chat service. I have to maintain accounts on all of them and install several applications to interact with each. It's a pain to manage. Not to mention that most of these services use Electron-based chat clients which exclude a bunch of people who cannot afford the kinds of machines required to use them or they have to suffer a poor experience on lower-end hardware. It also excludes people who use accessibility software or automation that doesn't integrate with web-based clients. The user experience on IRC scales better. Anyone can write a rich, easy-to-use client or server. If you happen to be a programmer you can write your own tools to manage your own user experience. The drift from casual user to power user isn't stopped by a walled garden of a tightly-controlled user experience that doesn't integrate with anything.