Two people would need to be on the same server to instant message. Basically you have private messages, and then group chats. The difference over something li

Two people would need to be on the same server to instant message. Basically you have private messages, and then group chats. The difference over something like AOL is that IRC is more open. Anyone can run an IRC server, so there was a lot of niche irc networks. https://freenode.net/ https://freenode.net/ is a popular IRC server for various open source communities.