@mcc Thank you for saying this.
People complain about various aspects of, say, the usability gap between Mastodon / The Fediverse and what Twitter used to be, and they raise a variety of good points, but on every one of those axes the gap between Discord/Slack and IRC absolutely dwarfs them.
I get that it's beloved of a vocal minority, but they are largely people whose lives have literally grown around IRC! Ivy asking sun-starved ground-cover to just climb a tree already.