I rarely use IRC any more and I used to run some small IRC servers. Most moved to Discord but I refuse to use such platforms for their abuse of retaining both text and voice transcription chat history forever. Discord voice transcription can run silently in any public or private channel and nobody can prove otherwise. This was not impossible on IRC but far less likely. Public channels were recorded with publicly visible bots that had permission to be in the channel. Some IRCD's had modules that would allow a NetAdmin to monitor private chats but that can be mitigated with clients that support OTR.
Nowadays if I need to spin up a chat with people I know I just give them a shell function that utilizes a self-hosted instance of devzat.
# uncensored chat using self hosted https://github.com/quackduck/devzat.git
# add to .bashrc or /etc/profile.d/functions.sh on a VM somewhere
function chat()
{
# make us a temporary nickname
Name=$(base64 /dev/urandom | tr -d '/+' | dd bs=12 count=1 2>/dev/null)
# make us a temporary throw away ssh key. key is our ID.
ssh-keygen -q -t rsa -b 2048 -N "" -C "${Name}" -f ~/.ssh/.chat_"${Name}"
# add +ssh-rsa in the event client restricts weaker ciphers
ssh -i ~/.ssh/.chat_"${Name}" -p 22 -4 -o "HostkeyAlgorithms +ssh-rsa" -o "PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes +ssh-rsa" "${Name}"@23.239.0.70
rm -vf ~/.ssh/.chat_"${Name}" ~/.ssh/.chat_"${Name}".pub
}