I agree with your sentiment. For FOSS to be successful, it needs to focus on UX, and beyond that, on what users expect from a product. It can perform better, be

I agree with your sentiment. For FOSS to be successful, it needs to focus on UX, and beyond that, on what users expect from a product. It can perform better, be more secure, be absolutely more ethical etc but masses don't choose software like this, it's a means to an end at most. On the other hand, IRC could easily be just used as an IM backend to a hypothetical FOSS discord alternative. You would press CTRL+V in the client, it would upload your clipboard image to the server, return you an URL, and that would be pasted into the chat box, which would then embed the image. GitHub's editor does this for example and it's a smooth experience, and perfectly compatible with a text-only protocol.