Well, the main value of IRC back when it was up, in my view, was that it was usable with our own tech in the form of Ambassador. Now that Ambassador is basically dead and the status of the branding is up in the air, there isn't much point in sticking with IRC for something like that.
Not to say that I'm totally closed off from having any kind of online chat in the future, but I don't see any special reason to make it an IRC channel rather than look into something a bit more modern, if we're starting over anyway.
The main issue with IRC is something that came up during the final hours... there is no host I feel like I would trust for it. I don't quite trust libera.chat, Freenode has its own issues, and we were relying on BinOC to provide the hosting. In other words, you-know-who was our IRC server guy, and we already came to the conclusion that we don't want anything to do with the two main providers of IRC channels anymore due to previous difficulties. That hasn't changed as far as I know, and if anything we're even more wary of infrastructure we don't control than we were when the IRC channel moved to BinOC servers in the first place.
I doubt MC would go for this, but I'd rather just have a good old-fashioned forum shoutbox plugin that's integrated into this community, rather than bother with IRC again. I like forum shoutboxes better than IRC anyway, because you can get new topic/topic reply notifications as you're speaking, it automatically requires a forum account as a prerequisite for entering the shoutbox, all the forum rules apply automatically, etc. The main issue is that you need more moderators to make something like that work, for obvious reasons. Also, it can increase load on the server.
Off-topic:
I will say though, on another forum I used to frequent, I was mad when they replaced their shoutbox with an IRC channel that wasn't as good. That was the reason why I had to learn how to use IRC in the first place, and honestly I never liked it, but I got used to it. I hated it because people who weren't from the forum kept dropping in, there were all these people messing around with bots and slash commands, etc. It was just annoying.
Why did I go back to it? Honestly, because it was the easiest way to communicate with you-know-who, he preferred it over the forum, and I was working with him a lot back then. So for me at least, being on IRC was more a concession to someone who is no longer around than anything I actively liked.
The easiest thing to do, though, would be to create a Discord server. Not ideal because Pale Moon doesn't fully support Discord's feature set, but it's a lot less setup than an IRC server, and wouldn't put load on the forum server like a shoutbox would.
Basically, if we ever do something like that again, it will likely not be an IRC channel, and one of the main problems would be finding moderators and figuring out how to avoid overloading our resources or putting trust in the wrong hands.
"The Athenians, however, represent the unity of these opposites; in them, mind or spirit has emerged from the Theban subjectivity without losing itself in the Spartan objectivity of ethical life. With the Athenians, the rights of the State and of the individual found as perfect a union as was possible at all at the level of the Greek spirit." -- Hegel's philosophy of Mind
