Matrix has pretty much replaced IRC for my needs, can even bridge IRC into it.
This point of view is so tired. It's the same mindset of those who long for the days of BBS.
I think people long for the cultural and social zeitgeist more than they do the platform and technology itself.
IRC works extremely well and has the best clients of any chat protocol. I also use XMPP and Matrix, but they always feel rough by comparison and have issues. Crashing, message delays, no good way to look through logs locally and quickly, etc. IRC is of course simpler, but it really sticks out how polished irssi and weechat are.
I just wish there was a way to bridge Matrix into IRC, instead of the other way around. I want to use my IRC client to join arbitrary Matrix channels.
Neat but it appears too broken to use. It crashes every time I connect to the IRC port it listens on.
Hi, author here. It's definitely broken in many ways, but crashes should not happen. Could you open a ticket on the bug tracker with the error message(s) you get and the domain of your homeserver?
I haven't used it, but if you like irssi you might also like profanity which claims to be inspired by it: https://profanity-im.github.io/
I have tried Profanity and it's only similar at the surface level. The actual features and interactions are very lacking. I'm convinced at this point that some of the best parts of irssi and weechat get ignored by devs of clients for other protocols, so the only way to get a great xmpp or matrix client is to somehow bolt that protocol on to the IRC client (like we have seen with weechat-matrix). Something as basic as switching channels in profanity is a lot harder. I use a "go" script for both irssi and weechat that lets me hit C-g and then type part of a channel/window name and press enter to quickly jump to it. I don't know of a way to do this in profanity. I have also found the omemo behavior in profanity to be rather unfriendly.
I haven't ever had an IRC server require a phone number but sure, choose Discord if that's what you like.