Don't new features go against the whole IRC idea? The original protocol is amazingly simple. But if you want to support connection persistence, you will need t

Don't new features go against the whole IRC idea? The original protocol is amazingly simple. But if you want to support connection persistence, you will need to pretty much redesign it - and in this case, why not go XMPP or Matrix? Both can already do that, and they are open source as well.