I'm a long time user of IRC, but none of my irl friends are on it (anymore).

IRC for me is a way to seek support for OSS projects and nothing else. It is not really designed to be a IM for phones...

IRC is really hard to do well, since it requires a consistent TCP connection to really be useful :/

Combine the parent's suggestions and use IRC over a Matrix bridge. It checks all the boxes when it works and as their comment mentioned you'll learn to hate things when it doesn't!

FWIW there are efforts to prevent this being required and they’re quite close to mature.

I currently run an irc network with these extensions.

I use a self-hosted web client (thelounge). It's still not good for casual IM usage IMO, but it's pretty painless.

I run znc on my server and Revolution IRC on my android phone and couldn't be happier about it.