I'm not sure why you are giving a definition when it's also missing things like being able to edit or delete a message. In 2022 I have different expectations on what should be included compared to IRC which came out in the 90s.
I consider both anti-features for _instant_ messaging since it's easy to misuse by hitting enter first and then editing their message for half an hour. Which people do a lot and is quite annoying since it breaks the flow of conversation.
Talking to a person also has none of those features, yet it's still as popular today as it was 300 years ago. And I view IRC just as the text-version of talking in person. So my expectations are that it has more or less the same feature set.
What about a compromise? If someone edits or deletes a message, those actions could be pushed to the client which chooses how to display that information
I think there are some IRCv3 extensions in the works for that, but imho it will make it even more confusing since not everyone will be seeing the same thing (at least for the edits), but I guess we'll see how widespread the adoption of those extensions will be.
And even with only partial support the delete function (if it's not limited to the user itself) gives way too much power to the ops/moderator (power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.).
How do you do this chăt if there's nobody to talk to? Other users are kinda essential too.
Reactions and images aren't essential for the strict interpretation of the word, but as everyone is used to them now you're not getting very far without them.
I'm not sure it's fair but my understanding is that Libera chat is the biggest network still going, with about 45k users. [1]
Relatively that's not widely used. Back when I used IRC you'd see that many people disconnect from the network during a netsplit if you were a network admin. Honestly if 45k people for the top network is widely used it's just... kinda sad really.
With modern resources you could probably get the the entire top 100 public networks running off a single machine. Look at Undernet, EFNet, DALNet! Those places used to have 100k users each on a slow day, they're barely reaching 10k now.
User counts have halved since I last looked, and have been decimated (literal usage of the word, nice) since the days I actively used IRC. I'll accept that maybe today is a bad day for stats or something, but it doesn't look like there's many good days left.
For clarity's sake I am still in the IRC demographic[2], but that's no use if no bugger else is using it. I'd love to get back into it if there's anywhere not-a-dead-software-support-channel to hang out but every time this comes up the usage stats just get smaller and smaller.
For what it's worth I rarely use Discord and dislike that back-and-forth knowledge for software communities is now locked away behind some rando company's sign-up form. If I ever set up a new community it'll have to be forum based I think.
[2] Literally my entire career was born in IRC. Wanted to make an IRC bot, figured that out, some other stuff happened, was seen as a tech type, asked to help admin a network I frequented, learned how to admin a Linux box, time passes, got a job doing sysadmin work.
I do miss IRC, made a whole bunch of internet friends on it and it took me down a career path I only sometimes regret.
1) To converse in an easy, familiar manner; talk lightly and casually.
2) To participate in a synchronous exchange of remarks with one or more people over a computer network.
No, reactions are not essential part of chat apps.