That's for network-level drama, sure, but in my experience most of the day-to-day drama was at the channel level and anybody can start a new channel. And back

That's for network-level drama, sure, but in my experience most of the day-to-day drama was at the channel level and anybody can start a new channel. And back in its heydays there were enough big IRC networks that you could just hop from one to the other if the admins became a nuisance. Then you had an eggdrop bot synchronize both channels during the migration, good times.