A lot of the alternatives are mostly extensions to the IRC concepts though (group chat, #hashtag, private chat, mentions, etc..). If all you need is text, IRC

A lot of the alternatives are mostly extensions to the IRC concepts though (group chat, #hashtag, private chat, mentions, etc..). If all you need is text, IRC is fine. I actually use a number of things through BitlBee [1] just to combine everything into one client. Scripting things in python is also fairly useful. [1] https://www.bitlbee.org/main.php/news.r.html https://www.bitlbee.org/main.php/news.r.html