On the bright side from all the proprietary locked in sell-your-data platforms that were mentioned as IRC successors, Gitter and Matrix are popular and open, an

On the bright side from all the proprietary locked in sell-your-data platforms that were mentioned as IRC successors, Gitter and Matrix are popular and open, and the later is federated. I'm not aware of any major feature IRC has the Matrix protocol doesn't provide, and it has all the niceties of Discord without being the proprietary product of a for profit company.