I can't say I miss IRC particularly. It does have a nice simplicity to it but the fact that connections are stateful and fragile is a real downer - I don't love

I can't say I miss IRC particularly. It does have a nice simplicity to it but the fact that connections are stateful and fragile is a real downer - I don't love that closing my laptop and wandering off somewhere onto a new network causes me to disappear from the network entirely. Bouncers like ZNC rely on having somewhere reliable to host one and are additional maintenance overheads. Leaving irssi or weechat open in a screen/tmux session on a remote host leads to a terrible mobile experience. I now just find it easier to interact with IRC users using Matrix bridges that other people maintain instead.