Its looking like Microsoft is gonna buy Discord. Preferably open source, and has a big userbase, and has Windows and Linux option. (but mainly windows because i only game on windows now.)
If you are setting up an IRC server, you just provide also a bouncer or use an daemon like Oragono that has it included… really not rocket science. Just think of an IRC server as a set of micro-services ;)
NICKSERV does support Email and probably other types of account verification and is client independent. Phone would obviously required a 3rd party service, but such API access is probably easy to add (not that I would recommend using such an anti-feature).
And image/preview proxying is very much supported by the web clients I mentioned above. And AFAIK ZNC also does that client independent.
I really feel like you are making up excuses not to consider IRC. Sure there are old clients that do not offer all the functionality you want. But those are just optional, most users will use the client offered by you and that really isn’t any different from another chat system, just that those usually do not support 3rd party clients at all.
If you are setting up an IRC server, you just provide also a bouncer or use an daemon like Oragono that has it included… really not rocket science. Just think of an IRC server as a set of micro-services ;)
NICKSERV does support Email and probably other types of account verification and is client independent. Phone would obviously required a 3rd party service, but such API access is probably easy to add (not that I would recommend using such an anti-feature).
And image/preview proxying is very much supported by the web clients I mentioned above. And AFAIK ZNC also does that client independent.
I really feel like you are making up excuses not to consider IRC. Sure there are old clients that do not offer all the functionality you want. But those are just optional, most users will use the client offered by you and that really isn’t any different from another chat system, just that those usually do not support 3rd party clients at all.