Comment by dewey
12 hours ago
Many GUI IRC clients do image / video embedding, even 10 years ago. Voice chat / video / screenshare is probably not a good fit unless you run some kind of secondary infrastructure like Jitsi and make it look like it's part of the client. Doesn't seem like a great fit though.
Yeah it'd need to be some kind of secondary infrastructure - I don't see it being part of any official IRC spec any time soon. But it would absolutely make IRC more appealing to the "average" user.
I like IRC, and I am online all day on various servers, for nostalgia reasons mostly, but I think everyone knows it's dated, had its time and will slowly fizzle out if we like it or not.
I think the main problem there is that there's not really any motivation to build that on top of a simple protocol like IRC. The strength of the protocol is that it's distributed, easy to understand, text based and lightweight and I'd guess most current IRC users are people who use it for a very long time already.
Tucking all these mainstream features that people are used to this days to get feature parity with any other competitor (Slack / Teams / Discord / Matrix etc.) will not make IRC more popular, it will make the protocol more complicated and fragmented.