I am very glad this is happening. IRC was one of the first applications I started using on the internet. These days it nearly disappeared because of closed silos like Facebook, Twitter and Slack. This effort could help bring back a decentralized service that is not under the control of any single company.
That's the sad thing about decentralized services, they follow a standard that doesn't get updated. Facebook and slack can add new features every month, but adding a new feature to email or IRC is so difficult.
Okay... I agree adding features to email and IRC are probably not the easiest things in the world. There are a number of useful features that have been added to email over time though, and I don't think decentralized control of the protocol is the bottleneck. Wave might or might not be a good example.
I'm a huge fan of the IRC protocol, and I think I've set up IRC channels at nearly every company I've worked for.
Freenode and Weechat seem to support the changes, but I honestly worry that the protocol ends up more complicated than it needs to be, or possibly more complicated than people can use. Diaspora already provides a lot of what IRCv3 looks like it's trying to do. I guess I'm just not sure what the difference is.
