IRC is sadly going away slowly. Which is a shame, it's a great protocol that is easy to implement and simple to work with. Biggest problem I see is its inability to embed images and other multimedia. Had that been the case protocol would live on I feel. We just needed few more channel modes, some that ban or allow specific multimedia and inline image support and we are good.

Some people, if not most who use IRC, would claim otherwise, but there's a reason why Slack became popular even though it's shitty electron application.