IRC is dead in the sense that it is in a late stage of decline that can not be reversed anymore. The death of freenode was a huge hit as well. It seems like the

IRC is dead in the sense that it is in a late stage of decline that can not be reversed anymore. The death of freenode was a huge hit as well. It seems like there were efforts to fix IRC with IRCv3 but I don't recall any major support from clients and servers and it was too little too late. I just checked wikipedia and it is coming up on a decade since v3 was started and yet no major network supports it. And v3 was only the bare minimum required to modernize IRC and misses so many other important features people demand like inline images/files and a mobile friendly protocol. Of course it will never be dead in the sense that literally no one uses it. Almost nothing ever dies that way.