Being an open standard certainly slows down progress of IRC; but the main reason IMO is that barely anyone is paid to work on it. This is were Element excels:

Being an open standard certainly slows down progress of IRC; but the main reason IMO is that barely anyone is paid to work on it. This is were Element excels: they managed to get investors on board, allowing them to get hundreds people paid to work on Matrix, allowing Matrix to move fast. (Too fast if you ask me, as other clients and servers struggle to keep up with the flagship implementations; but that's another discussion.) > Still working on signing up for a new account on the todo list. We even have a draft spec with three implementations, now! :) https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/account-registration.html https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/account-registration.html What hindered previous attempts for years was trying to cover every use case, which suffered from feature creep before even getting implementations.