I often come across these types of comments about the IRC protocol being 'crufty,' 'old,' etc. I recently (a year ago) implemented a subset of the IRC protocol

I often come across these types of comments about the IRC protocol being 'crufty,' 'old,' etc. I recently (a year ago) implemented a subset of the IRC protocol for a project and I thought it was fairly modern, and not difficult to work with. Yes, IRC has some problems, it wasn't built with security in mind. I think dsl below offers a solution to some of these concerns. But this still leads me to ask the question, what does a modern distributed chat protocol look like?