Does anyone know which IRC group this descends from, if any? Back when IRC was the thing it was split into rival networks, there was EFnet and IRCNet - I still remember when they split from each other, rather acrimoniously, over questions of governance and network protocol. And then there were the alternative networks, Undernet and DALnet and possibly a few more.

I was involved in server-to-server protocol design for a while, and each network had very specific ideas of how they wanted it. IIRC Undernet pioneered the use of timestamps to keep track of channel membership priority, EFnet came up with a v2 twist on the same idea, while IRCNet rejected the approach in favor of some kind of limited server-side persistence. Heady times!