Decentralized servers and custom clients would solve a lot of my problems with that app, but too many of The People I Want To Talk To use it
1. message IDs
this is a requirement for a lot of the small features that cloud-based corporate chat apps have, that users have come to expect. reaction emoji, tagged replies, message edits and deletes...
some of those features are fundamental changes to assumptions about the IRC message history being a log of what has happened, not something that a central actor doing policy enforcement could do after the fact. this is important because if it is POSSIBLE to apply central control, the legal system will force it to happen.
there are also technical challenges here, but they're solvable, there are fairly well-known techniques for generating identifiers in a distributed fashion, it's not that it's easy but it's doable. however, the EASY way to do it would be to move to server-side state, which is the other big issue.........
2. server-side message history
hopefully everyone involved in actually running IRC understands why this would be bad. for example, the persecution of marginalized communities is harder when chat logs live only on end user systems and not in a single central place whose operators can be threatened, subpoenaed, arrested etc.
so since - as far as we can tell from a great distance - server-side history is rightly off the table, the challenge is how to convey to users that you can only see messages that happen while you're signed in, when everyone today has forgotten what it even means to be signed in due to the prevalence of cloud architecture. once people understand what it means, you also have to convince them that it's a good thing, but first you have to get them over the learning curve at all. today, in our personal experience, most new users trying IRC are confused by that and don't understand what's happening, so they bounce off it because it feels unusable. no, recommending irccloud does not solve the problem.
so, what do?
well, hopefully if more people understand this stuff we can all talk more about how to handle it, and eventually get to an IRCv3 spec that isn't deadlocked on fundamental questions, and then get it deployed and get the masses on board
we want to be clear, the fact that IRCv3 hasn't been rammed through despite these questions is a good thing, a sign of a healthy process driven by genuine concern for the safety of users
also we hear about all these discussions second-hand, we don't participate in them directly, so if we're misunderstanding or misstating something, we apologize. we are bringing our own privacy experience and anarchist organizing theory into this, as well, so there's a fair chance that we are seeing something as being "really about" an aspect of it that others wouldn't perceive as fundamental, but we tried our best to report it how we see it.
anyway! since these are political questions, not technical ones, the solution to them is public awareness and public discussion. if you read this far, you're already helping. thank you!
These are (unsurprisingly) good points. I guess it brings us back to the Real Problem being that it has become super niche for a Normal User to have a small server at home, even though that's a thing that totally could be in reach financially. It's just unexpected so the support isn't there.