Well yea, it's a sad fact that IRC requires a client side server running something like ZNC to work as needed. IRC is great in many, many ways, but this is a fundamental flaw. It's nice there are solutions, but they are technical, require hosting, and aren't perfect.

Other chat protocols fix this but lack the base, and are having trouble competing against the likes of Slack or iMessage in different use cases for example.

I'm excited to see how Purism's Librem 5 is going to play out with matrix as it's primary communications platform.