While I love IRC, and freely admit it’s dead, dead, dead for good reasons, I still value it for a few things: - Fast to build on. You can write a functional cl

While I love IRC, and freely admit it’s dead, dead, dead for good reasons, I still value it for a few things: - Fast to build on. You can write a functional client without a huge budget or a research team. - Decentralized by design. Centralization is ultimately about trust. One provider can shift policies or “enshittify” whenever its business model changes, making your community fragile. - Zero-friction guest access. It’s refreshing to pop into a random IRC server without handing over an email address or pinning it to my Discord sidebar before I know if I even like the place. For most of my chat use cases I don’t care about end-to-end encryption. If I need privacy with someone I meet on IRC, I’ll just send them a Simplex link. I’d rather keep the protocol lightweight and let each public space define its own standards than overload it with features I don’t need. Spelling and grammar fixes via ChatGPT because I’m on mobile, sorry.