That's nice as an optional feature but as a baseline it just seems like sentimental skeumorphism/metaphorism.

Chat being real-time is certainly "approaching real life" much moreso than fully asynchronous email, but most people don't want either to be real life: chat still needs an element of asynchronicity to distinguish it as a technologically useful medium improving over actually walking into a real room.

To put it another way: if I'm in a real life room where being present for the full conversation is necessary, it's easy to excuse being late or going to the bathroom as unfortunate parts of life when people are repeating themselves. When there's simple technological solutions that can easily prevent me from missing anything important, and someone's telling me they don't want it because they like the inconvenience, that's harder to justify.

It's a very interesting topic. Feature will alter the sociological / human aspect of the tool. I could feel it on discord, you join a room like on IRC, you join a realm, a group with lots of idiosyncrasies.

When I join an IRC chat there's a lot less baggage.. it's just a label / topic, it's very freeing.

logging, message fixing, embedded replies .. all great but not important in the end. These things are blending professional complexity with normal human moments. Not the right optimization (if optimizations are required at all)

Having the ability to reply to a message would be incredibly useful in irc, which is being worked on: https://ircv3.net/specs/client-tags/reply.html

Everyone of these feature is entirely awesome, but when talking i actually find that it changes the nature of the convos.

Threading is handy though. Although keeping track of so many convos was half the fun of irc.

The system, probably by design but also to limit capacity requirements for the server, is ephemeral, everything only exists in the moment and once everyone leaves the channel it ceases to exist, once your connection breaks your nick ceases to exist. There is no storage at all.

You need the irc services to keep specified information (like ownership of channels and nicknames) and they probably could also collect logs, with some limitations in case of netsplits of course.

How about partial backlogs? Like say I could "subscribe" to certain keywords (upto a max limit if that's necessary, say 10) and the server will store all messages containing those words or my username.

If I need more context about those messages when I return, I can just ask those users (or a bot).

Having the days history could be useful.

Still maybe there could be a way to summarize those chats with some kind of a transforming generative text system that I hope exists one day.

Depends on the server. Many servers give you a reasonable amount of backlog before joining. A lot of regular users use something nice like Quassel or ZNC.

Good point, connecting to a client or bouncer right on the server resolves this.

Yes, but then you need a client/bouncer which costs some sort of resource, whether it being your own computer, VPS or paid service.

It's not trivial to setup a bouncer for the new guy who's just worked out how to connect to IRC.

Other chat services effectively prove this true of a solution for the client logging in.

I learned a lot about how far matrix has come along and seems to have solved many of the swipes and gripes against irc.

> It's not trivial to setup a bouncer for the new guy who's just worked out how to connect to IRC.

As I recall, newbies often figured out how to do this pretty quickly, even before the recent trend of IaaS and free tiers. Shell accounts with bouncers were a quite common offering back in the day.

It also was not uncommon to have Friends help show you how to use irc. Maybe even in person.

I fail to see the value of expending time to configure extra services for functionality that I could get by downloading a client to another service that might not be ideal, but works enough to not care about.