Are there any obvious fire-and-forget solutions to hosting IRC servers for friends? With Mumble it's a simple sudo apt-get and you have your voice chat running, but at a first glance IRC seems to be a bit more involved, surprisingly so.

We don’t need to presume anything, OP can speak for themselves.

Sure they can! Until they do, there's my helpful take for the meantime.
But don't take my word for it, you could also piece together their intent by them thanking all the other helpful responses in this thread that happen to elaborate on legal obligations 😄

Asking the real questions! 😄

What do you mean by this?

Many things in life come with legal, moral or financial requirements and obligations. The OP presumably wishes to know whether there are any that they might not yet have considered in their situation.

Could you elaborate?

Their leader calls journalists vermin and they go on about the ‘Lugenpresse’, his followers shoot up synagogues, allied media spread Nazi/far right inspired anti-semitic canards like Cultural Marxism (‘Kulturbolshewismus’), they go on about how the ‘’‘left wing intellectual elite’‘’ are trying to undermine western values and cause a decline of morals and degeneracy (‘Entartung’), they’re afraid of difference, they hold the weak in contempt, they abhor nuance so use a limited newspeak vocabulary to limit critical reasoning, they’re obsessed with plots, and on social media many of his followers spread the Q-anon conspiracy which is a reworking of the antisemtic blood libel canard.

Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, is a duck.

I presume we're no longer talking about the movie's marketing department...?

Here’s a Sartre quote that’s also increasingly relevant (again):

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

What I'm reading here are things in the lines of "Good faith anti-Semitism doesn't exist" or "anti-Semitism is intrinsically confrontational and quarrelsome". I don't quite think that's a tenable position as it would be trivial to disprove. Am I misreading this? What is your take?
Are you sure the line is concerned with anti-Semitism in general and not only with a very specific kind of anti-Semite (e.g. mid-century, mid-Europe, Bierkellerputsch-y types)?

What you write on argumentative strategy absolutely pertains to the topic and I'd say it also holds true. I just don't really see what it has to do with fascism. Aren't you conflating a couple of things here?
Even when "Fascism traditionally employs that rhetoric" holds true, there's no way that "Someone employing that rhetoric must be a fascist" can ever follow from that. A fascist might be a very special kind of moron, but it's dangerous to then start calling every moron "fascist", because it lessens the impact of that term, devalues it, if that makes sense. It makes undermining actual fascism much harder.

i absolutely disagree. the way insurance works is you all pay into it and they use that money for claims. it’s literally our money.

Again, you do not "pay into" anything. There's no pool or fund or growing personal account. You buy a service. There is an exchange of goods and services here. As you receive the service, the money ceases to be yours.
Whether or not other people file claims with the insurance doesn't matter, just like it doesn't matter whether or not the baker buys new furniture after selling bread to you. They're not paying the furniture store with your money, they're paying the furniture store with their own money that became theirs as soon as you relinquished it to them in exchange for the bread.

On every single professional sports game I’ve ever seen, every single show, every single channel. Isn’t this our fucking money you’re meant to give out should, god forbid, something happen?

While there's certainly no redeeming feature to be found in the advertising industry, I feel like you might be missing the point of insurance. An insurance does not safe-keep "your" money. You pay insurance for a service, you then receive the service and your money is gone, spent, as if you had bought groceries. The service you receive is what is called "coverage" but what is more easily thought of as "immunity against bankruptcy due to X", X being the insurance case. That's what you buy.

Figuring out how to best allocate the money is up to the insurance - it's their money, after all.

It's the content, presumably in order to maintain exclusivity of the little private club. That's part of the problem, I suppose. Private trackers aren't just an anonymous one-stop supermarket like some public trackers, they're often small personal hangouts, actual communities. In of itself that sounds great, but it always carries the danger of content being held hostage for what - at least in my eyes - amounts to pointless, snobby elitism.

I strongly disapprove of private trackers. I'm forced to take part in some only because the content isn't available anywhere else. And the private trackers generally forbid re-sharing their content on public trackers, which unnecessarily gatekeeps the content and perpetuates the problem.
If it doen't help to make everything accessible to everybody then it's not a valuable part of the sharing ecosystem.

Unless it can natively run all the existing ready-to-go Pi images and software packages and will also receive community support when I ask for help in a Pi-adjacent forum it's not really going to be a competitor to the Pi. The hardware is pretty much irrelevant.