You made it sound good except for the cloud bits. If you toss those out, it sounds like IRC, which I agree is great. However, the local logs I can dig through w

You made it sound good except for the cloud bits. If you toss those out, it sounds like IRC, which I agree is great. However, the local logs I can dig through with `grep` and `less` very quickly are a huge part of what make IRC great for me, and why I've never felt quite as comfortable in newer stuff like XMPP and Matrix (although I do use all three regularly still). If I have to search from within the program, I find that it's basically never as fast and as powerful as what I want. If the local logs use some sort of database instead of a plain text file, I feel my hands are tied behind my back. This is more of a client problem than protocol problem, I think, but IRC just still has the best clients by far. I really hope some other things can come closer to matching irssi one of these days. Logging, keyboard shortcuts, scriptability and configuration, not automatically re-ordering my precious channels. So many things are worse than irssi. Also, before someone says it, I know irssi has XMPP support, but lack of OMEMO made me not bother. Similarly, weechat has a Matrix plugin or two, which was the best Matrix experience I've had in a lot of ways, but it was super buggy and would break or constantly log me out, so I couldn't seem to stick with it.