Well that's the whole idea behind Snapchat, but I get your point.

Sometimes I wish I didn't have so many messages saved forever tho, honestly.

Not just persistence in terms of "exists after I read it", but in terms of getting the messages at all. When someone sends you a snap while you don't have snapchat open, you get a push notification about it and the message is waiting on the server for you to read it.

In IRC, anything that happens while you don't have an active session just doesn't exist.

That might work for some communities, like programming language groups where I can hop in, talk about something with whoever's online, and hop back off.

But if I'm chatting with my friends and we're trying to make plans for the weekend, everyone really needs to see that conversation regardless of whether they have the client running right this second.

Well yea, it's a sad fact that IRC requires a client side server running something like ZNC to work as needed. IRC is great in many, many ways, but this is a fundamental flaw. It's nice there are solutions, but they are technical, require hosting, and aren't perfect.

Other chat protocols fix this but lack the base, and are having trouble competing against the likes of Slack or iMessage in different use cases for example.

I'm excited to see how Purism's Librem 5 is going to play out with matrix as it's primary communications platform.

almost every single irc server since 94 or so have some sort of logger. if not, it's an intentional design choice for that one community.

You're suggesting people scour logs for missed messages as if that's seriously your pitch for "IRC has that, too."

This is exactly why people who are pro-IRC are watching the sun set on IRC and they don't have a flaming clue why beyond condescending suspicions like "it's the users who are idiots."

Maybe september is starting to end?

Yeah sure, conversation persistence is neat although personally i do not consider a must have. Regardless, my comment was really about how "noob friendly" IRC was/is.

Agreed, it's not that hard to use. But it's worse than other free solutions in some important ways, so whether people can use it matters less than whether they'll bother to.

As far as I can tell it'll continue to exist for communities that are on it, or maybe for new ones that are deliberately trying to select for the kind of person who's willing to deal with IRC's limitations. Those are both perfectly valid cases, not everything needs to be aimed at mass market adoption.

But beyond those groups, there are lots of nicer services that most people would prefer to use for one reason or another. And even if the self-hosted and/or free software leaning groups, Matrix looks more promising looking forward.