It also does not and never did support consistent history or multi-device.
And it never will, because having some way to identify a message is a prerequisite for even phrasing the question "does device_foo have message_x synced yet?"
Bouncers don't count. They reintroduce centralization as a way to solve the problem. It's a solution, of a sort, but it's a fairly poor one if your original aim was decentralization.
And "working fine" is also frankly a bit of a stretch, isn't it? I can't count how many times I've seen a "netsplit" in freenode or the other IRC networks. That means messages aren't delivered. It's so common we have a word for it: "netsplit".
I shouldn't dunk on IRC too much, because at least it's honest about itself for being simple, and there's a virtue in that. But if we were to construct a statement like "IRC manages reliable message delivery without any concept of message IDs", then that would be false (or technically, vacuous), because it doesn't manage reliable message delivery.
And it never will, because having some way to identify a message is a prerequisite for even phrasing the question "does device_foo have message_x synced yet?"
Bouncers don't count. They reintroduce centralization as a way to solve the problem. It's a solution, of a sort, but it's a fairly poor one if your original aim was decentralization.
And "working fine" is also frankly a bit of a stretch, isn't it? I can't count how many times I've seen a "netsplit" in freenode or the other IRC networks. That means messages aren't delivered. It's so common we have a word for it: "netsplit".
I shouldn't dunk on IRC too much, because at least it's honest about itself for being simple, and there's a virtue in that. But if we were to construct a statement like "IRC manages reliable message delivery without any concept of message IDs", then that would be false (or technically, vacuous), because it doesn't manage reliable message delivery.