IRC is a Very Old Protocol, you're right. if you dig through the spec you will find a few historic relics: 7-bit ASCII only, 254 character max total line length

IRC is a Very Old Protocol, you're right. if you dig through the spec you will find a few historic relics: 7-bit ASCII only, 254 character max total line length (some reserved for the message itself), and many many more. NATS as an IRC replacement is using the wrong tool for the wrong job. I've long been thinking about how I'd replace IRC and I keep coming back to another IRC-era protocol that wasn't as popular but was definitely ahead of its time by some amount: Hotline. It wasn't Open like IRC and was limited to Macintosh users for a long time, but it has a lot of what most people are looking for in a "chat system" today. One thing, however, that I think would benefit the protocol designers of the future: Learn from MSN. MSN separated their Authentication and Chat systems. You ask for a token that identifies you to the chat system from the authentication system. These were two separated protocols that did one thing specifically for each other. I honestly think that separating chat-locus and identity from one another is important.