Post related to a thread but I can't really slip it in anywhere: IRC is dead. It's a great protocol but the development community has rested on it's laurels in staying up to date with a changing userbase and baseline expectations in usability.
There's nothing fundamentally unfixable, but it's too late. Slack and Discord have eaten the markets IRC should compete with it in. Matrix is cannibalising the currently active IRC userbase and I don't see them coming back.
IRC is on the back foot, and IRCCloud aside, no one is pulling in the right direction to improve it. And even IRCCloud is caveated as a closed source, for-profit venture.