Excellent idea! You'll have a mature, open standard protocol under the hood, with no vendor lock-in, excellent extensibility, and great modern frontends like The Lounge (https://thelounge.chat/) or Convos (https://convos.chat/) to choose from (and you can choose). - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago

For the other layers one can front-end IRC with TheLounge [1][2] or Convos [3][4]. TheLounge only persists history in private mode meaning that users are created in that front-end and chat messages are in Redis. For small networks or groups of friends this is probably fine. Notably missing is voice chat. I use the Mumble client [5] with the Murmur or uMurmur [6] server which is light-weight enough to run on... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago

FWIW TheLounge [1] and Convos [2] can front-end an IRC server giving it much of the look of a modern client and also chat persistence when using TheLounge in private mode. The trade-off in my opinion is scalability. With a bog standard IRCD I can handle tens of thousands of clients per node. Adding web persistent chat adds memory usage. [1] - https://github.com/thelounge https://thelounge.chat/ [2] -... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago

IRC is a mature, extensible, open protocol, with a wide variety of server and client implementations to suit many use cases, servers can be self-hosted and federated, and modern web-based clients like The Lounge or Convos offer a user experience equivalent to Discord, Slack, etc. Source: over 1 year ago

And there are some great web-based clients like the Lounge and Convos that offer an equivalent UX to Discord or Slack, are open-source, self-hostable, and based on a mature, reliable, and extensible open protocol. Source: over 2 years ago

Both of my preferred clients, AdiIRC and KVIrc are rockin' and rollin' on Windows 11, I've been running the Dev builds since July and the bugs have been minor and infrequent and the devs have been quick to adapt. Source: over 2 years ago