[headhasthoughts]

A very basic IRC client can be made literally with pretty much ten lines, netcat, head, echo, cat and a named pipe. It's not bollocks. IRC is super easy to develop for.

Even doing basic stuff with Matrix, on the other hand, while still better than most, requires a lot more effort. The docs are decent, though.

[Arathorn]

Here's me literally writing a working Matrix client by typing ~7 lines of bash into a HN comment box: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20948530