There's better protocols like PSYC, XMPP also supports chat. Never took off, though, because IRC is fine as a protocol: It doesn't do much, Latin-1/UTF-8 hybrid is nuts, but it works well enough for what people want from it: A water cooler. Go visit libera.chat, it's exactly what it is. What we got instead is discord, proving that people don't care about tech but fancy marketing and, allow me to be an old man shouting at internet clouds for a second, zoomers still know it from minecraft. Also presumably you aren't "professional" if you don't require an email address, the young'uns learned that from popups on blogspam sites.