The only way IRC could be considered simple is if you are talking about the entire stack without any abstractions. You can technically open a connection to an i

The only way IRC could be considered simple is if you are talking about the entire stack without any abstractions. You can technically open a connection to an irc server with NC and just type the IRC protocol by hand. You can't do that with Matrix because it sits on top of HTTP. But this is an absolutely insane way to think about software.