Hector Martin

And so I'm left with the idea of just having a freenode channel, with @whitequark's logging bot in it, letting people bridge in via the Matrix bridge at least until that becomes a problem, and calling it a day...

Yes, it's terrible, it's plain text only, it has no sane file transfer, it has no log integration, it's not particularly newbie-friendly... but nothing else seems to be strictly better in enough ways. And at least I already know how it works and so do most FOSS devs.

I haven't made my decision yet, feel free to try to change my mind.

To everyone saying Discord this Discord that: look, I'm in more Discord servers than IRC channels these days, I get Discord. I still think it's not the right option for this project, and enough people I care about would never use it.

One thing that *might* end up happening is dev chat on IRC, user chat on Discord, or something along those lines.

Creating an IRC user per discord user sounds really heavy, especially considering how popular this topic is and how it'll end up with thousands of users easily. I don't know about anyone else, but I for one don't want several thousand part/join notifs when the bot crashes or smth

Not to say that IRC bridging is a bad idea, just saying that this particular solution may not be ideal.