I am excited to announce the 0.1.0 release of Perpetually Talking Online. PTO is an IRC frontend to the Matrix protocol. This is the first release of what started as a small side project and has recently become surprisingly relevant.
Matrix is a modern decentralized communications protocol with some cool things like server to server federation and native HTTP/JSON format among others. The big use for it right now is building a federated chat network. The most featured client out there right now is Vector which is a web-based client.
PTO is similar to Vector in that you can login to a matrix account, join channels, and say hello. However, it speaks IRC instead of HTTP. This lets you join the Matrix network with the same IRC client you're already using now.
More information is available at pto.im, and the v0.1.0 release page on github.