It has modern features. It stores message history. It has a fairly unique feature of letting you create ad-hoc "topics" (that go under a "Channel") that make it easier to manage the flood of conversation.
I've set up Ergo and KiwiIRC before, and it seemed pretty cool. I even enabled the Jitsi plugin in KiwiIRC, so it was like an indie alternative to Slack or Teams. I turned it off years ago, but if I were to do that again, I might try with UnrealIRCd.
