It's declared dead by the people where every single one of your 20 nerd friends in your xmpp contact list has shut down their server, and that happened like 8 y

It's declared dead by the people where every single one of your 20 nerd friends in your xmpp contact list has shut down their server, and that happened like 8 years ago in my case. We were on IRC before that and we're still on IRC, that's why IRC is alive.