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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

I used IRC for over 10 years, but after using Slack for 1 it just felt outdated to me.

Offline messages and simulatnous logins from multiple places are just two features I was missing in IRC and didn't even know till I had them, haha.

But yeah, IRC networks just worked as message broker and not as databases, so I never thought about it.

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Slack isn't an IRC replacement. It's business trying to embrace, extend, and extinguish the IRC protocol so they can capture the business market that uses IRC and collect rent.

I think it's Slack's business to allow for realtime communication and file exchange between people that don't know how to operate a terminal, which is like 99% of everyone. If their only clients would be 'business market that uses IRC' they would have a hard time making money.

That's why I use Mattermost, which Slack Without the Suck™. It's free, fast, easy to use, visually appealing, supports PostgreSQL — what more could I ask for?

Well, a native Android client. But other than that, what more could I ask for?

Mattermost is working on a React Native Android client. If anyone is interested in helping, here's the step-by-step roadmap: http://forum.mattermost.org/t/react-native-roadmap/2339

Compatibility with a real protocol, IRC, instead of just a marginal bridge. Mattermost will still splinter communities.

The "real protocol" sucks on ice nowadays. No conversation history, no offline message storing, no push notifications, absolutely none of the niceties we've learned since 1990.

The whole reason the Slacks and Hipchats and Discords of the world exist is that IRC is a terribly limited protocol that many people have tried to hang enhanced functionality on top of and none have succeeded.

Personally, I'm in favor of letting the better product win. IRC has been objectively superseded in nearly every way that matters.

I don't know about you but I have all of those things simply by leaving my bog standard IRC client connected to the networks.

IRC is not a limited protocol. What is happening is that people are using limited computers and networks (smart phones) that aren't capable of the same thing a 1990s computer was.

Which only means the use case for the average user changed and the protocol failed to keep up. And you speak as if the few things I mentioned were the only things that IRC can't do that literally all of its competitors can, rather than a small sample of missing features.

Let's see, in addition to what's above, off the top of my head:

    * Video chat / screen sharing
    * Audio chat
    * First class support for connectors to external services (i.e. not a fake client connected to each room)
    * First class support for permissions, registration, etc (rather than a fake god-client service package)
    * REST API

Compared to IRC, Slack is more beautiful, more usable, more flexible.

It's a great microcosm of the free-vs-proprietary debate that's been raging so long. Slack is winning the fight because it wins in ways that are visible to everyday users, while not being philosophically better.

> video, audio, screen sharing

You know what else IRC can't do? Be a version control system. And it can't be a webserver, or do GPU accelerated machine learning, or act as a spreadsheet.

As for "First class support" I'd argue that those kind of things make for a less flexible chat system. It's like having a strongly typed classes instead of everything as strings; like Powershell vs a unix shell.

REST API? Ah yes, in 2016 everything needs to be HTTP, I forgot.

Your snarky strawmen address none of my points and will not be responded to.

I'm very curious how you think user registration and an API make for a less flexible system. What exactly are you wanting to do with Slack that the existence of an API and a registration system prevent you from doing or get in your way of doing?

And considering that Slack is generally accessed via HTTP, it kind of makes sense for it to have a sane HTTP interface, something for which every language has decent tooling for...

I'll add I also did these things with 200MHz CPU's, 64MB of RAM, scarce space on HD, a crappy kernel, and a 24Kbps Internet connection that was down most of the time. I'm sure these GHz machines with Nix cores and sporadic 3-4G can handle it. If average developer really tried. ;)

Just to chime in here,

Matterbridge connects Mattermost with IRC, XMPP, Slack, Discord, and Gitter: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge

A good part of this discussion is how IRC is completely outdated. If anything, that makes those still stuck on IRC those that need to move on to "real protocols"

Also not being able to see or search chat history was a deal breaker for IRC. It's like the days before answering machines...

Do you mean searching the history of when you weren't online? As every client I know of can keep a history of your sessions.

Right, when not online.

I'd argue that most people that use IRC use shells and a terminal multiplexer to access IRC, and this isn't an issue for them.

I use ZNC, so logging in from multiple places works well.

But now you have to run a ZNC server as well - it's a lot more work for a very simple feature.

It's not "very simple" - it's just that with Slack, someone else is running ZNC for you.

Chat apps don't magically "just work" - either you run your own infrastructure, or use someone else's.

Even with IRC you are still using someone else' infrastructure -- unless you run your own IRC network from scratch of course.

If you ever want to feel like you're bashing your head against a brick wall over and over, set up an IRC server with channel/nick services.

WeeChat + relay clients can do it as well, you only run weechat in a tmux/screen somwhere and connect to it with a relay client (Glowing Bear or WeeChat-Android). Works nicely, with synced state and arbitrary history scrollback

I honestly just run a raspberry pi that has Weechat running all the time in a tmux session. So I just SSH whenever I need from wherever, pretty much (with obvious security settings configured).

It works really well and is a cheap solution.

ZNC is great. I run it on a Pi so I don't even really have to worry about reboots or anything on another machine.

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