Hello,
I have hosted my own XMPP account and it’s really fun, hosting an XMPP server is way easier than hosting an XMPP server which is not a good experience. I also find a lot of public servers of my interest, I guess I will be leaving IRC in favour of XMPP server :)
I read the whole thing, but my brain decided it should replace IRC with XMPP while reading, so it made less sense. xD