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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

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 IRC has been objectively superseded in nearly every way that matters.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"

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