The author of the article explicitly waves off IRC and offers some good suggestions at the bottom of the article.
(More than privacy concerns, a major concern for IRC in this era of mobile devices is protocol chattiness. Phones save battery power by minimizing messages per second required, and IRC's protocol isn't designed to work well with that architecture).
IRC is annoying to use on mobile even with bouncers or services like irccloud, in addition file uploads, easy third party integrations with mostly everything, and given a pretty sane ui/ux it makes it an easy choice for many companies/projects.
Yes, you could do most of these with irc's v3 protocol, but no one seems to be investing time and money to do that.
Matrix bridges for irc are also interesting as you get some of these benefits, but to the dismay of the IRC users that will see links for messages longer than what their server allows, and weird usernames that include [m].
I would love to see IRC make a comeback but the fact is IRC on mobile is a pain in the ass. Users want persistence and IRC is designed for the opposite.
In today's mobile world, IRC sucks. I've used IRC for years. Sending files is a pain in the ass due to everyone being behind NATs these days. People can flood servers with garbage. Names can be squatted and trolls can run free. Not so much with Discord.
It also doesn't require a bouncer just so you can go from mobile to PC to tablet without issue.
No, I don't. Mobile phones are immensely more capable than computers 30 years ago, but IRC doesn't handle transient connections well. When your phone goes to sleep the connection drops. Sometimes when you change cell towers the connection drops. Modern users expect a slack-/discord-like "always in the channel" experience, with push notifications, which IRC does not provide.
I'm not convinced IRC will never die; for a while it was the only thing that covered that use case, but these days there are other options (e.g. Discord).
Why are people still using IRC? It has no encryption, no privacy. Even if your client uses encrypted comms, the other clients are not, so everything is easily surveilled.
You can run your own matrix servers and they address most of the issues you can find with IRC. It's true that for a short while Matrix had some privacy concerns, and I'm relieved that they're being answered within a reasonable timeframe.
IRC's network architecture only survives because people tolerate it. Even slightly animosity from the community brings it down hard every time.
I think what's valuable is the chatroom model, which is largely dead outside of Telegram (which is, I agree, unusable from a user privacy and control standpoint). Part of the reason I'm passionate about this is that I want the model to be robust and well-maintained. I am nostalgic for the model, but I view the underlying legacy implementation as an obstacle to the preservation of that model.
On the other hand, the mobile/cellular world has been largely responsible for killing off IRC.
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