Discord had a really nice UX. Click the link, choose a nick and you are thrown into the chat. That way you could checkout a new community and discord in genera

Discord had a really nice UX. Click the link, choose a nick and you are thrown into the chat. That way you could checkout a new community and discord in general with a really low barrier to entry. The community that drew me to discord made the jump when their self-hosted IRC network became increasingly unstable. The multimedia features like easy picture sending ware also very nice, as was the mobile client. Still dislike the condecending tone they have towards the users tho. And I still use IRC on other networks. Both with a shell running irssi in screen and hexchat on my desktop that starts up with windows. That's for more ephemeral communities.