Aren't a lot of these addressed with IRCv3? https://ircv3.net/ https://ircv3.net/ Some of these are already in place, eg. IRCCloud can render simple markdown,

Aren't a lot of these addressed with IRCv3? https://ircv3.net/ https://ircv3.net/ Some of these are already in place, eg. IRCCloud can render simple markdown, supports push notifications, can show inline images, supports display pictures, Slack-like threads, emojis, etc... An example: https://twitter.com/IRCCloud/status/971416931373854721 https://twitter.com/IRCCloud/status/971416931373854721 Hopefully longer term we won't need to use IRCCloud/a bouncer to keep chat history. AFAIK an IRCv3 server should be able to offer that natively (to an IRCv3 client). As for unencrypted TCP... a lot of IRC networks seem to offer TLS these days. Not saying this is perfect -- far from it, but people are working on improving IRC!