Same. I used mIRC back in the 90's, but ever since I started dabbling with servers I preferred to have an irssi client running inside a screen session somewhere. Allowed me to catch up on things that happened while I was AFK, as well as provide some continuity while I was on the move and/or on a dodgy connection.

Unfortunately it's practically unusable for my use case, which is talking in CJK channels on non-UTF8 servers (when the channel name also has such characters), because recode support has been broken for 20 years.

That's the first one I thought of as well. And your third point, too... Haha

I downloaded it not that long ago and worked great!

Seconded. Weechat and Gomuks for matrix chat.

Just to let you know, Hexchat is no longer maintained, unless someone has forked it. Might be worth looking into alternatives.

https://hexchat.github.io/news/2.16.2.html

Same. Hexchat + znc = peak of software development

Already coming up close to 10 years of The Lounge! Really gets the job done nicely as long as you don't hate webapps. By far the least broken option for mobile unless you go IRCCloud.

IRC's not as popular as in its heyday, and while once it was the main choice for multi-playing gaming chat (Quakenet et al), that's largely gone elsewhere, but it's still very good for certain technical channels.

IRC has also proved to be remarkably resistent to commercialisation, mostly due to the users. Even when one of the biggest networks, Freenode, got taken over by a drug addled mentalist Reference who started insisting all all kinds of strange things, the users just upped sticks and created a new network. A bit of fuss, but the important stuff stayed the same and it's continued much as before as a new network, Librenet.

I am still active in some private irc servers. The communities haven't changed much since the golden era of irc.

It is. It's obscure enough for the normies to stay away. Which is its main feature

Discord is closed source and has no way to easily archive/record conversations. This makes it unsuitable for a lot of open source projects who need a chat client. I've not used much Discord but potentially the "gamer" culture might put people off.

Matrix seems good but it's not quite there yet from what I can tell. It's got way more features than IRC but none of them seem to work that well. Like a swiss army knife full of blunt tools.

For IRC I'm on the libera.chat server. Usually hanging out in the gentoo channels since I use that distro. There are a lot of different channels for the various devs, user tech support, niche uses like gaming* and also offtopic chat channels.

*More gamers tend to use other linux distros for some reason

Do I have to self host it to make it work or can I just install it on my machine

Yes TheLounge is fantastic but I switched to Convos these days because it's lighter weight and I somehow manage to overrun my disk much less often :)