IRC has loads less overhead with equivalent ephemerality! :)
I'll not bemoan folks choice of comms channels, just would be nice to have a consistent place to do it. Between Gitter, slack, IRC, Discord, and others, fragmentation of chat clients is annoying. Pidgin solved this all a long time ago but then XMPP got dumped.
XMPP is still alive (= there is a community maintaining protocol, clients and servers). I am using XMPP exclusively for chat since about one year, pulling in most of my friends. It seems that if users do not demand the usage of Internet Standards like XMPP we will be stuck with corporate walled gardens forever. See also: https://blog.samwhited.com/2019/02/whats-wrong-with-xmpp/
