As a result of this discussion in [email protected], there is now an IRC channel about degoogling!
/join ##degoogle on irc.libera.chat:6697 (TLS). The channel name begins with a double hashtag (according to the namespace policy).
Come on down and join us through your local IRC client or the web client web.libera.chat!
If you really want privacy, you could run I2P. Here’s some notes on making an IRC server over I2P.
https://i2pd.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorials/irc/