> IRC simply lacks important desirable features, making it poor for community building (given the existence of better alternatives). The two biggest missing features are persistence and search.

A channel stays a channel until nobody's in it. It's trivial to make a bot that sits in a channel and logs it. And it's trivial to hook up a search engine to that bot.

> Other important missing features are ease of use in terms of creation of topic-focused channels, private channels, and high quality mobile and desktop clients.

Like on freenode #reprap , #3dscanning , and thousands of other topic based channels?

And setting private bit is easy as a channel operator to limit who shows up.

And with completely public and open protocols, anyone can make an awesome IRC client. I have one already on my phone.

And there's also bots that can store and send files via http or ftp. I could also make one that saves/retrieves via Box, Dropbox, or any other storage medium trivially. Node-red makes that easy.