A long, but interesting personal reflection on the virtues of IRC in the age of centralized services such as Discord:
Much as the dreaded Reddit has largely paved a fascist monopoly over the niche once occupied by a bounty of independent Web forums, Discord has done the same with the chat world, replacing the sea of independent and free IRC servers with a single corporate walled garden whose owners each user must avoid offending in any way, lest they be entirely cast out of the public square.
Anyone who has ever used IRC knows that there is nothing even remotely complicated about using it, but the terminology and the steps required to use one are ostensibly terrifying enough to reliably keep the technically illiterate at bay.
Meh.... The fact that I can log on after a while and read all of messages sent before I left makes some of the async-supporting chat applications more appealing to me.
There's a cloud based IRC client called, simply enough, IRCCloud, that essentially acts as a remote client, keeping you logged into your IRC servers at all times, so that when you return you can just open up the app on your end and see them all