Building ChatNova: How I'm bringing IRC into 2026 with a modern webchat IRC is dead, right? That's what most people think. Discord won, Slack took over the workplace, and IRC became that nostalgic thing your older dev friends mention sometimes. I disagree. And I'm building ChatNova to prove it. Why IRC, in 2026? After years of using Discord and Slack daily, I started noticing things that bothered me: Bloat : Discord eats RAM like it's free Centralization : One company, one server, one point of failure Walled gardens : You can't use your own client, your own bot, your own anything Constant feature creep : I just want to chat, not deal with another "AI Assistant" feature IRC solves all of this. It's lightweight, federated by design, client-agnostic, and has worked reliably since 1988. But IRC has one real problem in 2026: the onboarding experience is brutal for newcomers . Telling someone "download mIRC, configure this server, type /join #channel" doesn't fly anymore. That's the gap ChatNova fills.…