[darkwater]

I guess that because of the "we don't need that here" attitude that ran a lot through the first generation(s) of Internet population. And it's a shame because with a more dynamic IRC development we wouldn't be in the Slack/Discord silos situation.

Or maybe we would have been anyway because adding more and more complex features to federated, open-protocol systems with many actors involved with different, maybe even competing interests is not easy at all.

But also if I think back at late '90s, IRC had almost the needed critical mass and non-tech users to become something more mainstream...