[lifthrasiir]

> Gopher and IRC make it possible to use any client of your choosing, thus keeping innovation and improvements accessible to anyone with an idea.

I agree to the former and disagree to the latter---they are not correlated. In fact, IRC has demonstrated that it might be hard to adapt to new requirements without breaking many things (no matter it's an existing client, a community or a requirement itself). Today the relevance of IRC is mostly due to the existing community and not due to the technical innovation, and casual users wouldn't benefit from that. I don't know much about Gopher but I haven't seen any counterevidence to this observation.

[rhabarba]

The new(ish) IRCv3 standard does not break compatibility with existing clients though. If they don't support all of its features, they just have less things displayed.

[lifthrasiir]

I know IRCv3 is in progress, and I wish it to be successful, but frankly speaking this has been done 10 years ago.

[rhabarba]

Some of the more recent IRC clients already support most its new features, including v3.1.