We'll let you get away with it ... this time.
ytalk was definitely multi-user capable, although a bit hobbled compared to IRC/forumnet/etc.
There were actually a plethora of tools, not all of them "Internet", which allowed multiple users to chat. I still have a copy of Galacticomm's MajorBBS (1986) in the closet here, and maybe TBBS hanging around somewhere too, neither of which got native Internet capabilities until some years later, and of course there were other bulletin board systems, and we had other stuff like a local public school which ran a locally authored "CB emulator" on its mainframe that random people could use if they knew the login. This might have been inspired by TENEX, which had some sort of talk facility as well. The concept of chatting was definitely a hot one, and unfortunately a lot of interesting things that came by at the time never actually became sufficiently popular to have survived.
IRC won a commanding lead on the Internet primarily because it scaled very well, but it had (correction: has) a horribly masochistic configuration and administration syntax. Speaking as someone who ran an IRC node in the late 80's/early 90's, it definitely worked, but it was also a pain to do operations that were not in your daily workflow.