terminal-wise, irssi and weechat are the traditional ones recommended these days. but there's a couple newer ones like catgirl: https://git.causal.agency/catgirl/about/ and some rust ones out there.
GUI-wise there's HexChat, mIRC, Quassel, lots of interesting options to look at.
Yeah we didn't need to agree in writing because I didn't sign anything giving them access, control, ownership, or anything else over my IRC projects. They offered to purchase one of them at one point, but I respectfully declined.
Ah! So what we have right now is a websocket API (so clients can speak IRC via websockets), and our default config basically turns the ircd into a 'bouncer' (it automatically stays online all the time, caches message history, plays it to you when you join and all that).
We're looking at some new persistence capabilities and caps to speed up connection, which should (hopefully, eventually) provide something similar to that c2s bouncer api in terms of speed: https://github.com/ergochat/ergo/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aiss...
Always up to take on and look at suggestions though :D
It depends. There's a lot of people on/around IRC who really like it (see libera and all the other networks), and yeah there definitely are people spinning up new smaller networks. Especially with things like https://sr.ht/~emersion/gamja/ and self-hosted https://kiwiirc.com/ , as well as really polished client experiences like irccloud, it's easier to convince people to join in.
Right now I'm working with a dev from libera on a client that aims to replicate a lot of things experience-wise from newer chat services. Hoping that with that, smaller self-contained servers can become more of a norm~ But for now, your best bets for finding activity are probably Libera and a couple of the other larger networks.
To be fair there was also collaboration between PIA and Linux Mint while I worked at PIA. That'd probably be a question best answered by the Mint people who're involved
Oh haha, hey! I was employed by Andrew across a fair few of his companies (I didn't know Shells.com was owned by him while I was working there though). Buuuut this is entirely unrelated to him, same as my other project https://ircdocs.horse/
It's totally fair to make that link, but I very explicitly told everyone over at LTM/H (including PIA and Handshake) that Oragono/Ergo and ircdocs were not work projects in any way. And while I was working on Shells.com, I was very explicit that I wouldn't be touching any IRC stuff for money while there.
But yeah, it's definitely good to be wary of these kinda links, given what happened to snoo's and fn/libera's team. If you wanna ask any more questions about my stuff in particular, feel free to ask here or send me a mail at [email protected]
For what it's worth, we've been throwing around a websocket standard that should be supported across a range of servers. On the decoupling sessions from the TCP connection side, the server that I work on (Oragono https://oragono.io ) does this by default, and I've heard that InspIRCd has plans to do work on this issue as well. Definitely a lotta fun stuff in this area.
GUI-wise there's HexChat, mIRC, Quassel, lots of interesting options to look at.
May be worth digging through these tables a bit more if you're interested: https://ircv3.net/software/clients