Ah, but you see, that's hosted by the server operators, so it's fine. I mean, er, decentralised.
to be fair, that does mean it doesn't add an additional party who can spy on all communication
No, only freenode. Do we consider them trustworthy?
Of course! Why, only two months ago it was among the most trustworthy public IRC networks in existence.
No! But adding another party adds a another risk, however tiny! And uh I guess ignoring that irccloud is probably gonna have invested more into security than the geniuses behind the "hm maybe we should ban irccloud" operation, but, that's just details!
IRC in general would be a MITM, no? I don't know the network geometry, I assume every message goes via the IRC server rather than peer-to-peer. Seems like a decision a user should legitimately make for themselves.