If they implemented one of the first two front-ends I linked, you would know what the message was and would not have to ask your friends to repeat The only people that opt-in are the IRC server infrastructure engineers. End users just connect to the web front end. The first two links turn your IRC servers into a Slack clone, except with more or less features. This is certainly non-trivial to set up and maintain and end users would not implement this. They are just consumers of it.
Now I don't understand. I'm clearly talking about other people (everyone else but you), not the nerd running irssi on a VPS nor thelounge.
In other words, IRC isn't worse than Slack/Discord in this regard because you have to opt-in to these things. It's worse because everyone else has to, and they clearly don't.
For example, that I pay $50 to irccloud but nobody else does still makes IRC a poor experience for me because IRC is about communicating with other people, not masturbating over my irssi config.
I am not talking about putting TheLounge or Convos on a VPS node. I am talking about IRC administrators putting that, or a fork of that in front of their IRC infrastructure, so that you and your friends will have chat history / session persistence.
The reference to VPS nodes was specifically for the case of WeeChat or Epic in a tmux or screen session as yet another alternate option. That is in no way related to TheLounge or Convos.
