ZNC and earlier implementations have been around for 15+ years to provide queuing proxies. Pretty much all of the "unique" features found in current chat systems were also implemented in one fashion or another in the IRC ecosystem decades ago. Ease of use has definitely improved, in exchange for for-profit company control over communications in these systems. IRC's decentralized nature still argues for its relevance even now.
IRC is not really decentralised, is it? Or are you arguing that it’s decentralised in the sense that each user can implement and control some features like logging?
