To connect to the darkfi irc you need to run a local node which will participate in the p2p protocol.
This method of installation is more beginner friendly. There are very few commands and not many ways things can go wrong.
Nix is a special package manager which will build the ircd and all dependencies. It's just a one-line install on a terminal.
On Linux: https://nixos.org/download.html
On MacOS: https://wickedchicken.github.io/post/macos-nix-setup/