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I think the main problem with IRCv3 is that there are a million optional extensions (see https://ircv3.net/software/clients for a feature support matrix of popular clients)
This can get especially confusing when people on different clients have divergent views of the same conversation. e.g. some can see the emoji reacts, others can't. some can see "replies", others can't.
If you look at "old" internet: fidonet ftp fsp wais netnews whois++ gopher rime ... i mean irc is one of the only ones that is still used mostly as it was 35 years ago. Pretty impressive.
Makes me wonder if moving away from discord back to IRC would be a fun move. But I think we'd miss mobile access and accounts on different devices maybe? Any thoughts?
An IRC client with an extension for image/video embeds and a voice chat (with video/screenshare support) would go far.
I've ended up managing to vibe an IRC client for Twitch over the last couple of weeks to make following the sometimes flood of the [Hasan] 'Piker Broadcasting Service' stream chat a bit easier;
Some of the actors that are listed on that page already implement many of the v3 features (Like https://www.irccloud.com), so it's not really something that will come with a big bang and we have to wait for a release, it's just that not all clients support it yet.
I wish IRC supported images. It's weird that to share a screenshot I need a chat platform that also support VOIP when I just want to paste an image in the chat.
On this topic: https://robustirc.net/
It's a server side change, robustifying the server-to-server links and its effects on connected clients.
IRC was great. But I don't think it can bounce back with the alternatives that we now have. A focussed effort to get Matrix working, or any of the open source alternatives would be better. Of course, people invest their time in what they think is fun and that is fine. But the already existing alternatives provide what people need and want today, so IRCv3 will have it infinitely harder.
Maybe with all the age verification spyware around its time I finally went back to IRC chat.
IRC is dead to me, you can thank Andrew Lee (of Freenode infamy) for that one.
if you look at the linked roadmap, most issues are from 2020/2021, with one from 2017, when Discord appeared.
So yeah, we are going to have the Dyson swarm before this is done.
Does IRCv3 need new leadership to continue to drive it forward? Over at Parley/Ahoy (https://git.mills.io/prologic/parley https://git.mills.io/fastidious/ahoy) we've managed to create a federated decentralized IRC chat experience with a Discord/Slack-esque feel but true to both IRC / IRCv3 (Ahoy being a fully featured IRCv3 client).