Having many IRC clients is a good thing because I can have the experience I want, not the experience someone else wants me to have.
That's also the case with open protocols like IRC. Sure you can write an IRC client with reaction emoji support, and it will look great in your client, and anyone using a different client will just see garbage metadata. You can only innovate by getting "everyone" to agree on a new standard, and that's hard.
No, it's not.
> Sure you can write an IRC client with reaction emoji support, and it will look great in your client, and anyone using a different client will just see garbage metadata.
Then you are bad at protocol design.
> You can only innovate by getting "everyone" to agree on a new standard, and that's hard.
No, you innovate by being backwards compatible with established standards.
Now, maybe IRC has reached the limits of its flexibility and should be replaced, I dunno, but the idea that it is somehow impossible to evolve protocols incrementally with partial adoption of new features is just bullshit.
I don't really think so, but I don't really know, I haven't every tried to do anything in that direction.
> It has certainly had a lot of time to try.
Except that people have to do it? As far as I am concerned, IRC is good enough, so I don't feel like putting any effort into "improving" anything, and it seems like a lot of people using IRC feel this way. Those who feel it's not good enough, though, seem to prefer building non-interoperable systems or just using proprietary lock-in vendors. Obviously, that's not gonna result in anything new in IRC.
Hu? Because they won't take my contribution that rips out all of the web interface and replaces it with EMACS?
I mean, what does this even have to do with FOSS? Developing stuff as protocols instead of as user interfaces does not in any way prevent FOSS, very much to the contrary. There are FOSS IRC clients in all shapes and forms: Web interfaces, X GUIs, Windows GUIs, mobile clients, terminal UIs, EMACS modes, XMPP bridges, Matrix bridges ... how is any of that "reinventing the wheel", and how would we be better off if all those clients had to be part of one "IRC FOSS project" rather than independent projects with standards-based interoperability?
How the fuck did people come to think of this as a negative? One of the stupidest things about "modern" IT services is that the public interface is a user interface instead of a machine readable iterface, so you can't build a user interface that fits your needs or preferences, you can't innovate features independently, and you can't use software to process the data, you have to interface everything with a human (or go to great length to scrape stuff 'n shit ... just the point of using information technology!).