I agree. IRC was definitely great. Staying connected was definitely a problem, but the conversations made up for that. I had so many good friendships there, and I loved the ease of creating a new channel and gather there with friends. The ops system was definitely really good. You could do everything with the channel.

I do frequent old servers I used to hang out on sometimes, if they still exist, that is, but like usenet, most channels are for downloading or nsfw stuff. Really sad, it was such a cool place to be!