My friends and I started a private IRC server when we were in university and still use it to this day (15ish years later). We also used to run a ventrilo server

My friends and I started a private IRC server when we were in university and still use it to this day (15ish years later). We also used to run a ventrilo server that quickly got replaced by mumble. I can't see us ever switching to discord. IRC was always a pretty big part of my life, it's where I got into organized quake/cs1.6/Dota matches. I'm not as involved in hardcore gaming now, but I suspect that's all been replaced by discord and automated match-making in games. I was also a great resource for learning about technical topics. Nowadays most open source communities point to discord/slack/gitter or something like that. I really wish IRC would make a comeback. All these new networks force you to use their client to connect, and I hate the modern design trends. mIRC (on windows) and irssi(on Linux) got the UX/UI pretty much perfect in my book. Everything since then just adds more whitespace and distractions from the actual important content (the chat).