Hey there,
what about creating a Discord server for the Nextcloud Community instead of the IRC chat? Many technologies moved from Gitter, Slack or somewhere else to Discord 
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Is there an open source alternative?
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Yeah, please no walled garden like Discord.
Mattermost team edition is great if NC wants to self-host something. But IMHO maybe just a simpke a bridge bot like Matterbridge would be easier to link IRC with a channel on Discord? It’s really simple to set up.
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I think it would be more appropriate for Nextcloud to use and promote a federated chat service like Matrix/Riot or Jabber. Nextcloud could benefit from Riot’s integration capability (also open source).
Matterbridge can also link to XMPP/Jabber and Matrix.
IMHO Matrix is a pain to selfhost and currently in practical terms federated in name only as nearly the entire network depends on the main official node.
I am all for a XMPP solution, but since NC chose to roll their own with NC Talk, I rather have them stick to the basic IRC channel than reinventing the wheel again 
Matrix is […] currently in practical terms federated in name only as nearly the entire network depends on the main official node
While maybe most users are registered on the main node, there are many other Matrix servers. And the service of those other servers (with own identity server) should not be affected if the main node went down, so the network can be seen as federated.
What’s wrong with IRC ?
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People are not actively using it.
I do have a BNC running on Freenode IRC and it has become much less active than 7 years ago. If the goal is to have “maximum compatibility” and open chat that no one wants to use then nothing is wrong with plain IRC.
If the goal is to have more structured chat with threads, URL previews, push notifications and occasional voice communication then almost anything but IRC would fit.
It will be hard to beat Discord since it has become the de facto real time communication tool for gamers and many online communities.
Jabber/XMPP is more or less dead.
Discord will probably be around longer than Mattermost, Riot and other alternatives.
Dealing with self hosting any of them can be quite painful.
Discord does not require installing any applications but using them can improve the experience in certain cases.
Nextcloud is already using Github - a closed platform that has huge developer user base.
Why not use similar approach to communication?
Set up Discord with IRC bridge for backwards compatibility.
And set up archiving so conversations wouldn’t get lost if Discord would be swapped for something else later on.
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I think Discord provides awesome support for dev communities. Yes, it is not self hosted but I think Discord has the biggest user base at the moment.
Creating discord channel for Nextcloud Community is a horrible idea.
Discord is just a flavor of the month that advertised their proprietary services with nonfree code alot and got some kids on there to steal their data.
No real FOSS enthusiast should use it, and it would be silly to have channels for a project thats all about freedom and decentralization
Anyway, discord does not even work (with libreJS enabled) so lets just forget about it.
On Matrix protocol there already servers for kde.org, suse, librem.one so the community there is growing rapidly, and its properly federated.
Even if we dont want to selfhost, those servers would most likely welcome Nextcloud Community users with open arms.
Mattermost is pretty good too, and so is rocket.chat.
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I moved it to the developers section since it is mostly used by developers. However even most core developers are not really active on the forum.
If it is mainly for developers than I would really recommend to use Mattermost, due to the great Github/Gitlab integration and compatibility to Slack integrations.
There is also the option to allow people to log in via IRC with Matterircd.
Mattermost works well. I prefer Rocket.chat as I find it has a nicer interface + integrates with Nextcloud. Either would be a great option!
Matrix is a good choice because it is by far the most popular! All are fully open source and can be connected via Matterbridge, which actual supports this forum’s Discourse software!