Comment by dewey
13 hours ago
I've been using https://www.irccloud.com for years, it takes care of all these things and also has an app / push notifications. It's still IRC, but it takes care of a lot of the annoying parts of it that made it feel dated.
If you make IRC centralised like this, you’re taking everything away that makes it IRC. You could build the same thing with XMPP, Matrix, or Signal.
It's as centralized as everyone running their znc on Hetzner. It's mostly just a bouncer with a nice web interface (Like The Lounge) and a rudimentary app for people who want to pay someone to run this setup. You'd still connect to Libera and other networks and there's zero lock in.