I never used IRC growing up, to my knowledge, though I'm sure I used it by proxy in software that used it under the hood. Instead, I grew up with AOL Instant M

I never used IRC growing up, to my knowledge, though I'm sure I used it by proxy in software that used it under the hood. Instead, I grew up with AOL Instant Messenger, and then MSN Messenger which later became Windows Live Messenger, then Skype, Xfire, Pidgin and Trillian as clients, then back to Skype again, and now Discord, which is where I still reside most of the time today. When I thought about existing chat protocols I wanted to use in game engines and websites that would allow one to connect through existing clients without having to join the game or navigate to the website in question directly, I thought about IRC. But it seems like people use Matrix now, and it just hasn't caught on to my circle of friends. If I'm not mistaken, it almost seems like FOSS Discord. I was recently introduced to it by a member of a community of very friendly Quake Mappers. I wonder if there is primarily first a cultural barrier to these technologies and not a technical one. As usually I find more technical people on IRC than on Discord.