It's funny that your parent is downvoted below zero when he's absolutely right. I don't use IRC very much, but the last time I did, I wanted to use the name I'd registered with previously. Unfortunately, Pidgin kept telling me my name was already in use or some crap. It was quite difficult at the time, not being an initiate in the appropriate vocabulary, to figure out the search terms to use to discover that I needed to "ghost" the user or some ridiculous unintuitive incantation. I may have got the details wrong, but that only confirms my point. IRC is too hard for non-techies. I'm a programmer by profession, and if it gives me the slightest hassle, it's too hard for other people.
Maybe a nice client could make this pain go away, but I doubt it. All the ones I've tried have suffered from the same learning curve problem and the same in-grained assumptions that come from regular use of IRC. Even if one were easy and elegant, I'm not sure that could overcome the negative network effects of so many clients, billed as IRC, doing it badly. I'm not going to analyze it in detail right now, but there's myriad subtracting reinforcements from a community that mostly uses user-unfriendly clients and protocols. You can't just make one good client and get a tipping point. In fact, desktop linux does look like a good analogy here.
Moreover, it would be disingenuous to claim that IRC being techie-unfriendly is "outdated" when the majority of clients and tech how-tos pointing to clients are the same as they ever were. I would guess that the majority of IRC use is still done on unfriendly clients, e.g., Pidgin. One or two low share clients existing don't speak for IRC.
Now, I'm not saying XMPP or this client is an answer. But, yes, IRC is and always will be unpopular with the non-tech population.
Maybe a nice client could make this pain go away, but I doubt it. All the ones I've tried have suffered from the same learning curve problem and the same in-grained assumptions that come from regular use of IRC. Even if one were easy and elegant, I'm not sure that could overcome the negative network effects of so many clients, billed as IRC, doing it badly. I'm not going to analyze it in detail right now, but there's myriad subtracting reinforcements from a community that mostly uses user-unfriendly clients and protocols. You can't just make one good client and get a tipping point. In fact, desktop linux does look like a good analogy here.
Moreover, it would be disingenuous to claim that IRC being techie-unfriendly is "outdated" when the majority of clients and tech how-tos pointing to clients are the same as they ever were. I would guess that the majority of IRC use is still done on unfriendly clients, e.g., Pidgin. One or two low share clients existing don't speak for IRC.
Now, I'm not saying XMPP or this client is an answer. But, yes, IRC is and always will be unpopular with the non-tech population.