https://libera.chat is what Freenode turned into after Freenode imploded. Really great communities there - F/OSS-centric, yes, but there are good unofficial channels for cloud services, and even some proprietary software and services, like vscode, AWS, Azure, Oracle, etc.
ZNC is an excellent way to keep history between your IRC sessions: https://github.com/znc/znc And WeeChat is an excellent companion to ZNC and libera.chat: https://github.com/weechat/weechat And IRC for Android is an excellent IRC client that also plays well with ZNC: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.countercul... Cheers!