IRC is great. I've been on Freenode since I was an obnoxious teen. There are upsides and downsides to not (generally) having server-side channel history; one bi

IRC is great. I've been on Freenode since I was an obnoxious teen. There are upsides and downsides to not (generally) having server-side channel history; one big upshot is that nobody needs to maintain the infrastructure to store, curate, and archive 30 years of IRC logs for a whole network. XMPP is still a mess after all these years; there is no reason you should have to send so much XML just to send an IM or update your presence. I'm kinda waiting for SMTP to receive the slight adaptations it requires to be a decent IM protocol. As a long time SMTP operator, I think it's pretty darn close (especially looking at the way Gmail and Inbox [RIP] show threads), if SMTP daemons would cache trusted/known well behaved hosts, or batch/stream envelopes, that's prettymuch all that's missing on the server side.