I often hear people suggest that the internet couldn't exist without corporate interests and surveillance capitalism. usually along the lines of "If there were no ads, we wouldn't have any internet at all!"

That's an example of what corporate interests have brainwashed people into thinking. They didn't have to turn us against IRC. Most internet users don't even know it exists.

So, in this fictitious world where IRC is a stable protocol and easy enough for the average layperson to use, who pays for the IRC server bills and how?

> easy enough for the average layperson to use

At one point it was easy enough for the average person to use, because the average person had to deal with a command-line. But tech, in its infinite quest to Make More Money, keeps chasing the dumbest of the dumb so that it can expand its market into an imagined infinity. It kinds of reminds me of the windshield repair shop that takes a baseball bat to nearby windshields at night to drive business

How about we work towards unwinding this whole mess and meet users in the middle??

FOSS and open protocols are criminally undervalued because of greed, and all the fake newbie empathy it generates

Having better things to do with your time than learning an obscure CLI is not the same thing as being dumb.

Really? We almost saw a resurgence with the chatbot craze that recently passed. And frankly command-line is something that GUIs do easily, or have we as a field forgotten that too?

People have such a gap-filled view of the past. I barely had to learn any IRC command-line stuff because of mIRC