> IRC never had any channel discovery

wot? It didn't have server discovery, but once you connected to a server, you could definitely discover channels.

I remember back in the days of IRC being megapopular, a lot of servers would kick me out because they had too many channels and listing them triggered flood protection :-P

How different is it from modern chats? The original claim was that "it's harder to discover channels."

Same thing: find a server, connect to it. Boom, you have access to all channels (unless they are private).

The article is about WhatsApp, iMessage, Facebook Messenger, etc. group chats. What you said is inapplicable to all of those.

1. Those have all started as individual one-on-one chats. So, their roots show

2. There are many more “group chats” for the midern era. Ignoring them isn’t wise.

3. Even among those listed you have channel discovery, for example, in Facebook Messenger.

And no, a discussion on modern chats does not end with “IRC was better end of story”. It wasn’t.

As long as the channel doesn't have the +s (secret) mode, you can list all channels on a server, and that feature has existed since the first RFC iirc.

How different is it from modern chats? The original claim was that "it's harder to discover channels."

Same thing: find a server, connect to it. Boom, you have access to all channels (unless they are private).

I think Op referred to /list