I personally wouldn't mind IRC (also) having some of those features, and a client with a more Discord-like UX for those that want it.
But I doubt you'll achieve that by single-handedly destroying one of the biggest IRC networks out there and basically guaranteeing folks won't want to work with you.
This is not true at all. IRC has, maybe, 10% of the features and ability Discord has. I do agree a good, usable and more modern IRC client is a good opportunity.
That can indeed be done, although I fear that many clients and servers would implement these additional features differently, thus losing all the good that comes from IRC being an open standard.
I don't know if it's been attempted before... but I think it would be interesting to see something open and community-centered like IRC, but with all these little features people now expect.
I used to be a big fan of IRC, but I'm not so much anymore. The reason IRC tends to suck is channel operators and network operators that enable them. No amount of technical advancement will solve that problem. Channels on IRC are unique, and much like domains, so there's not much community competition to sack bad channel operators while network operators are very hands off.
What I'd love to see is an open source version of discord take off. Especially if there's a discovery mechanism built in.
So supplement IRC with a bunch of other services? Realising people didn't want to deal with this shit is why discord is so popular.
(Seriously, this response and others like it demonstrate that IRC will continue to remain a niche. I won't fault you if this kind of setup works for you but suggesting this kind of thing is acceptable for the average user is really, truly, genuinely out of touch. I'm among the demographic who can and has done this kind of thing, and I don't want to do it!)
Sounds right to me. The client is too heavy, and I too wish that there was more decentralisation and ability to use alternative clients, but it is what it is. IRC hardly has the user count or the features needed to compete with Discord. The world has upgraded the expectations of what a chat client should be capable of, and IRC hasn't followed suit.
There are nice IRC clients out there. I don't use them and I haven't used them in a group, because even in programming language communities many have moved to Discord/Slack, but I would prefer working with multiple simple tools than a monolith, different tools for different uses, and glue them together when needed (it doesn't need to be complicated, and if it is, than some additional effort is justified)
Speaking as someone who's used IRC for nearly a decade and who has developed extensively for it, it most definitely has not stayed simple, what with all the nonstandard extensions every network has brought with it. And while I dislike Discord for many reasons, its moderation tools is not one of those reasons; I'd like to see a good, open chat standard come along that adapts features such as invite tokens, rather than depending on accounts or IP addresses or someone manually inviting you into a channel.
To have a functional, modern IRC client, you have to not only implement what there is in the RFCs (which incidentally, no IRC daemon follows anymore, not even the original ircd2) but you also have to pull in IRCv3, SASL, ISUPPORT parsing, CTCP parsing, a TLS library, ... the list goes on. And for a good experience you also want scripting and the ability to abstract away the differences between services implementations (Atheme and Anope, mainly). Not to mention you have no clientside encryption option on IRC short of any number of buggy OTR implementations.
IRC is not great. It might be okay, but by no stretch is it great.
I think I would leave any platform that added most of these and that it is better for IRC to stay as-is so people like me have places to chat. People like you already have Discord/etc.
Imagine, someone makes an IRC client that looks like a discord clone, adds some centralized proprietary emoji/background/mini-game features that touches their own servers, and we go full circle back to IRC once discord IPOs.
But discord is a better experience than IRC or any other chat I know of, and I say it as someone who pioneered #quakenet, #freenode and #libera on IRC.
Instead of bashing library authors that have already so much to think, why don't you propose a discord replacement and pay for it, while providing the same ease of use for the users and the same features from channels, threads, third party apps/plugins, video conferencing, etc?
There's no reason that a web-based chat cannot also have a "thick" client which works as IRC currently does.
We can do both with a single service...
the true problem here is that IRC is long-forgotten by many, completely unknown by most, and those that remain remain because they have a strong attachment to IRC. That strong attachment will make driving a standard forward very difficult, because no two true IRC fans are going to have the same opinions on what a new version should look like.
It's the true fans of open source stuff that hold open source stuff back the most.
But I doubt you'll achieve that by single-handedly destroying one of the biggest IRC networks out there and basically guaranteeing folks won't want to work with you.
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