Add custom emojis and stickers to that.

Kind of baffles me that people still make chat apps without those.

Every chat product has these things?

IRC sure hasn't! Well, the IRC most people are using, anyway. You can work around these by using things like bouncers and third party HTTP hosts and assuming everyone else has a client that inlines media.

Multimedia transfer is still a practical impossibility, for better or for worse.

Mobile IRC works, sort of, if you don't mind spamming the channel every time you lose connectivity when you drive into a tunnel or when your phone goes to deep sleep. Again, you can set up a bouncer for that.

I welcome the new changes in IRCv3 and hope that one day soon all IRC users will be able to use the features everyone else has been using for fifteen years or so.

IRCCloud or a $5 VPS if you're willing to pay gets rid of the join/part spam

...But one of these things is not like the others.

"Anyone can start a server" is only true when you're lying about what a "server" is. (Or redefining it to the point of usefulness.)

A Discord "server" is just a defined chat namespace. All the Discord chat "servers" live together on the same actual load-balanced VMs or whatever on the physical servers they run.

It's honestly the thing that's annoyed me most about Discord from the very beginning, long before they introduced the ads and the microtransactions and the mandatory doxxing.

Quick, lets restart the argument about "self-hosted"!

How many people host their own IRC servers as opposed to using a public instance?

At least 4 people I know. It's super easy to put up an instance of ergo now. I was using one for LAN communication during internet outages for a while.

You’re missing voice chat and video streaming