IRC is what everyone used for group/channel chats back when I grew up, out in rural Norway. Most towns had their #town channels, down to some very small hamlets that are barely populated today. Man, all the memories.

Always had some joker that had download some nefarious script (legit script-kiddies), that they'd share on the channels - and eventually get permabanned from.

Then MSN messenger became popular, and kind of drove away the more casual users. And after that social media became a thing, and the rest is history. Haven't really used IRC in 20 years now. The people that continued to use IRC were mostly gamers, for team chats etc. But I guess discord killed that, too.