Concord channels on Nostr (https://concordprotocol.org/clients/) are handy for avoiding the centralization and privacy issues of Discord while also avoiding the reduction in asynchronous and media-enhanced functionality you'd get with IRC.

That said I can't say it's hard to just run irssi inside of tmux and attach/detach as necessary remotely. Nor is it hard to throw my media I'm sharing onto a web server. But yes, you do need to mix and match your utilities, rather than have an all in one package.

I do often enough find this to be more of a feature than a bug -- being stuck with Discord's UI is gross, but the network effect does have me continuing to use it for some groups.

It isn't hard, as i wrote i used to run irssi in screen back in the day when there wasn't another alternative, but that required me to have a VPS (i don't nowadays and i don't really want one because i don't want to bother with the admin side of things) and it is extra friction - and that is for someone like me who already has the knowledge to do it. For most people it is an insurmountable obstacle.

I think you underestimate how hard it really is. I don’t think anyone I know who isn't a professional programmer (and some who are) would have found either of your examples easy.