[fivre]

the original "protocol not commercialized" sentiment in the OP is a bit odd. nobody commercialized HTTP per se (okay, you could make an argument for SaaS CDN proxies, but i don't think that was the spirit of the original argument), they commercialized things you could deliver using it. the channel-based real time chat model is what mattered, not the intricate details of how the underlying bits are delivered

functionally, Discord and Slack have commercialized that model, with clear and obvious effects for people that were using IRC. every community i was part of via IRC has migrated to those services, and i haven't encountered a new community on IRC in forever, but have encountered plenty of new Discord communities

[ryandv]

The particular point about protocols is that IRC is dead-simple to implement. It's all ASCII/UTF-8, CRLF-delimited messages of space-separated tokens. You can get a working implementation with the stdlib of most languages in about 200 lines. The protocol hasn't really changed much over the years.

Contrast with HTTP and other related web technologies, whose specifications are so complex that only the largest tech firms can even dream of building their own implementations, let alone achieving full standards compliance. Moreover, those standards are also often driven by those same corporate interests who own significant usage share in the browser space.

To the extent that corporate interests will advocate for standards in their own self-interest (recent example: Google WEI), I would say that the protocol has been commercialized.