Decentralized, federated, encrypted, buzzword filled chat, with a slow af ui. And they have a bad habit of changing their named every few months. Also I question their implementation of 2fa.
Whatever, the protocol is called matrix and their web frontend is element. What's it good for? Not sure, but they advertise bridges to IRC
Their bridge/bots are can be somewhat unresponsive, solution is to wait a few days and try again. A safe interaction to test responsiveness is to change nick with appservice
note the different type of syntax for the 2 bots.
Assuming you have an existing account on freenode
msg to @freenode_NickServ:matrix.org
IDENTIFY username passwordmsg to @appservice-irc:matrix.org
!storepass password!nick newnick!join #channel