I have it running on a vps and what maintenance really?

Right now I work as an administrator for a few Red Hat servers. Notebooks are still Windows though.

We also are running our own videochat servers with galène (for ttrpgs), but those don’t have a persistent text chat

Eh, everything that tries to “improve” on IRC makes everything more complicated. I have a thelounge installation running that’s connected to our small IRC network. When I want people to chat I drop them a link to it (maybe with a room name) and it drops them right in. thelounge has some improvements to stock IRC (pictures, videos, and links visible in chat), but some of the more advanced functions still demand an account (e.g. there is an inbuilt persistent buffer, but that one is only visible to accounts). I have it running under thelounge.wilderland.ovh and it will drop by default into the #welcome channel.

Galéne, but it’s really only for video/voice chat. But that it does great, low resource use, and you can even have multiple media streams from the same machine without issue.

Is it actually Foss? I assumed it was, but recently I was checking and couldn’t find anything about licenses and stuff on the webpage.

Two LTO-10 tapes (and presumably a LTO-10 reader to copy them over because I don’t think the destination would have that)

Convos and the lounge do at least pictures, not sure about files right now

Irc with convos or the lounge as a web interface.

And yes, that’s what I am running.

I want my wife to be able to use it without having to install anything