A simple protocol at heart, yet extensible enough to be still going strong more than 30 years later.
My first taste of the "internet" (not really) came when I connected to a free account that an ISP in [[Argentina]] offered through a local number. With the free account you could only access a single website (the ISP’s), and an IRC server. The IRC server had a tight community of people from around the country that were doing the same thing I was.
Something I noticed about [[bridge]]s is that different messaging software has different ideas. For example, [[IRC]] has single-line messages. When bridging with [[Telegram]], multi-line messages are sent as several messages. Also, images. Telegram has captions, [[Matrix]] does not. &c. Problems arise. But connecting different places sure is great