IRC, like e-mail, is grandfathered in. There wasn't a centralized alternative that worked when they were born.
I think there were many options at the time.
Maybe the DCC transfer and easy scriptabilty thanks to Khaled Mardam-Bey's mIRC might be a valid claim.
Perhaps also the impermanence of the history of the channels afforded certain types of interactions that you wouldn't do with you know, theoretically forever scrollbacks.
I guess this brings us back to classical marketing about how you can't have a sustainable differentiated product based on negatives. (as in, this is not the bad guy). You need to have something in the affirmative
1988 versus 1996 and 1997, respectively. AOL proper was an IRC competitor, as was CompuServe, but their definitions of working weren't different from IRC's.
That same argument didn't save WAIS, Fido, or gopher. Nor did it keep Tymnet or Bitnet around and it also didn't give Compuserve and The Well a seat at the winners table.
Magnavox putting out the first home gaming console in 1972 hasn't made them a gaming juggernaut nor does Xerox run the desktop and Palm, Go and IBM do not control the smartphone market nor is my laptop by Grid Compass my microcomputer by MITS my spreadsheet by VisiOn or my pants from Arnold Constable.*
It also wasn't a saving grace for Friendster, Myspace, or LiveJournal.
Citing an early creation date is a survivorship fallacy here.
The real question here is why didn't it die like everything else. Why is it one of the few legacy survivors?
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* If that cadence sounds familiar, I'm borrowing from Ogilvy's Confession of an advertising man bottom of page 61 (https://archive.org/details/confessionsofadv0000ogil_r2a4/pa...)
Separate problems: getting off the ground versus surviving.
IRC got off the ground because it didn't have centralized competition with a capability advantage. Why it persisted is a deeper story. Lemmy is still trying to get off the ground. It, unlike IRC, does have such competition. As such, the old playbook is obsolete.
I'm going to disagree. The old playbook is to empower users in unique ways that at the time feel almost forbidden and magical and to competently execute that.
You could claim all those avenues have been explored but I disagree there as well. The surrounding context and possibilities are always on the move so the underlying potential is always changing.
That's why say, YouTube, the 40th or so on-demand video company, which happened to launch when digital cameras and broadband internet were becoming widely used, was the first successful execution or why smartphones didn't take off until the rollout of 3G or, looking into the future, VR might finally take off at attempt 100 after some related thing changes.
Text only, transient/short life data, is a lot cheaper to process and serve than images, permanent posts, etc.
It won the initial buy-in of us geeks/nerds/hackers/whateverthephraseofthedayis who gave it a rather solid base.
It’s a very personal type of communication. Real-time, immediate, and to a lot smaller audience (more intimate) compared to web forums, Reddit etc.
And finally, I would posit that it did actually die. What remains now is small, compared to how popular the likes of Reddit Twitter etc are, vs how popular IRC was in its heyday.
This is an interesting question. Wikipedia claims 230,000 users at peak times which is still quite a bit more than say, gopher. A 98% drop is real but you'll still see IRC occasionally for software purposes (like say, Debian)
Maybe it was a coalition of people there for different purposes and some of those groups have fallen away for different places.
For instance, people were doing dating and sextalk on irc back in the day. That application has been superceded by many other places.
It didn't help that the protocol evolved at an absolutely glacial pace with very uneven support across various networks, and doing anything but the most trivial sorts of channel management had to be done through a bot. Matrix seems like the obvious IRC successor due to its seamless two-way interoperability with IRC networks, but I suspect that it won't hit critical mass until Discord starts causing problems for its userbase.
Regardless, if I was able to capture 1% of the net, that's not a failure by any stretch.
How did IRC succeed here? Have any hard evidence as opposed to intuition or speculation?