Yes probably you are right. What I forgot to add on my comment is probably the most important IRC fact: That IRC is a totally and completely open protocol; anybody can create his own client or server and either join the existing IRC networks or create his own.

Actually, even if you don't have an IRC client you can right now just telnet to irc.freenode.com port 6667 and enter a couple of commands to join a channel and see the discussion: http://protofusion.org/wordpress/2009/08/irc-via-telnet/

The fact that IRC is an open protocol is of course what makes it "non-trending". You can't easily monetize from IRC and you can't hide the data of IRC behind closed gardens. Everything is there in the open.

Yeah I'm well aware, it's just that for all purposes except when thinking about data privacy etc., IRC is dominated by slack and even discord. Yeah, there are some curmudgeons who'll say "But I can't use discord from a shell!" or whatever, but that's not really meaningful