Are you running your own IRC servers or using something like freenode? If the prior, your comparison is moot because there's plenty of other centralized self-ho

Are you running your own IRC servers or using something like freenode? If the prior, your comparison is moot because there's plenty of other centralized self-hosted options that would work the fine (eg mattermost/rocketchat). Otherwise, many public IRC servers would experience a netsplit in these cases making them basically useless.