Hey, eng manager for the Chat team here. Thanks for the early feedback.
@tduva
The JOIN/PART IRC messages are not intended to go away with this change. These, to the best of our knowledge, are working as intended today.
MODE and NAMES are messages in a less understood part of the codebase that weren’t largely used by the developer community. They weren’t used by our first party apps, and there was additional maintenance overhead to test and maintain it as features/code changed around them.
The Chatters List is a product we’ve had a lot of internal discussion around. I can’t promise any timelines, but more official support for the functionality is on our radar.