I've also run one, and nowadays it is more like a bridge between Slack and Discord channels (there is even a dedicated API for such use cases, much like "bot" a

I've also run one, and nowadays it is more like a bridge between Slack and Discord channels (there is even a dedicated API for such use cases, much like "bot" accounts in those proprietary services). Given that those services generally refuse to cooperate with each other, this might be an interesting opportunity for IRC.