My hope is that bc it's an open protocol that it'll be simple to create local bridges to services and then hook those into an irc client. I agree with the parent that Discord and Slack are absolute messes and all I want is text on a screen with hyperlinks for chat.

To that end, I tried to set a personal server up on a local box that I have running, but it didn't take. I'm surprised there aren't any good tutorials sitting around to create a local instance/bridge.