[oliwarner]

The protocol won't die, but the people will.

For me, IRC stopped being attractive when Freenode changed owner. They broke it in two months and with no way to migrate nicks between servers, many lost their registered nicks on the channels that moved to other servers, and I had no want to stay on Freenode for the channels that stayed.

Identity is a major problem with IRC. Losing mine cut a core tether for me, it wasn't my space any more.

[RF_Savage]

The Freenode implosion also nuked chanserv and nickserv on Freenode side as well, so things happened there as well.