@meso @theorytoe @alex I keep seeing everyone say, "If only we had chat that was good!" And IRC is over in the corner awkwardly looking at the floor. Does it need a facelift? Yes, absolutely, and maybe even to the point where a new protocol is necessary. Maybe that's what XMPP was intended to be, but it turned into a <xtype ver="1.0" flavor="neutral">bureaucratic nightmare</xtype>.

There's been an attempt to coalesce all the IRC specs from the past three decades or so: https://modern.ircdocs.horse/ that would be a great starting point for deciding whether the protocol is salvageable or if something *very close* to it, but modernized, needs to be made.

Either way, a modern, Discord-like IRC client is needed at a minimum. Hexchat just doesn't cut it if we want to lower the bar for normies.

But IRC is, in my humble opinion, still the king of chat. Fun to develop for, simple enough, not encumbered by huge bureaucracy yet also standardized reasonably well.