IRC has far more problems than just ugly clients. The largest one is that it requires holding open a connection constantly to work. This is fine in the age of d

IRC has far more problems than just ugly clients. The largest one is that it requires holding open a connection constantly to work. This is fine in the age of desktop computers but totally unacceptable in the age of laptops and mobile. People also demand the features that modern protocols provide such as image uploading, encryption, profile pictures, etc. While a lot of this stuff can often technically be done on IRC, it never works as well and requires knowledge of how to set it all up. On matrix with the default client, it all just works. We can repeat the discussion about how dropbox is useless when you could just set up a ftp server on a vps or we could recognize that people like software that does what they want by default.