Well then everyone should feel stupid for not realizing you could make a billion dollars creating a sane sign-up and account management system for IRC.
Why do I have to sign up for different Slack organizations and have a different password for each one?
Why can't I private message someone on Slack with just a username?
I think Discord does this much better.
I think it is worthwhile to think of each Slack organization as a completely independent and isolated network. This is one way that they can reasonably give some security to their corporate customers. I don't believe that there is any intention to ever lat you send a blind message to someone on another Slack organization, but maybe I am wrong there.
It would absolutely be nice however for me, as a user who is in multiple organizations, to be able to log in one time and have all of them be connected.
I’m sure Slack is using their vast resources and large team to solve these problems at this point, but it probably hasn’t been easy to create a horizontally scalable system from the early codebase, especially when the data model was designed for a single team of users.
About the only thing IRC has going for it is decentralization, and that's not very valuable in the market it seems.
Seriously. IRC has had 30 years to get with the times. It's stagnated and been lapped by its competitors, and the efforts to improve it didn't properly start until Slack and friends simultaneously re-cooked and ate everyone's lunch and dinner.
https://irccloud.com has all these, done really well.
Offline message history you get also by running a server somewhere and just having an irssi in a screen/tmux.
Still my favorite protocol and I have some channels that I consider to be my favorite social network for about 10-15 years already.
Having to pay for basic features that competitors like slack/discord have is exactly why the slack community for something is often much bigger these days. Even the larger communities like #node.js are really just 10 regulars.
For example, Elm's slack is vibrant. Elm's IRC channel is dead. This is the reality for most communities I've been joining these days.
And on top of that, the behavior of irccloud from the standpoint of everyone else is identical to that of a bouncer like ZNC. It's yet another hack around the fact that clients don't exist in IRC unless they're online.
Unless, of course, you are talking about a user-friendly service offering IRC access to those who do not want to set up their own clients.
So, something like IRCCloud, which does exist, fyi.
Rocketchat has much more feature parity to slack tbh. Comparing slack to IRC isn’t really fair even though they do the same thing.
I have used irc and slack and slack’s ease of use is its asset. I used freenode in high school and college to teach myself scheme. The barrier to entry is not something that can be explained as just use IRC.
I run an office hours chat for my online classes powered by IRC. I use KiwiIRC as the front-end.
Students need only the web address of the web page I want them to go to. When they get there, they need only a username.
No signup, no verification, none of that. They're online, getting help in seconds.
Individual public channels requiring nickserv registration and all that? that's another story.
But seriously - the barrier to entry to get started is this:
https://kiwiirc.com/client/irc.freenode.net/?##irc_can_be_ea...
Some welcome message. You may be too used to IRC to recognize this, but this is frightening gibberish to 99.99% of computer users.
Also, this interface does not get you crucial features provided by other chat services, such as seeing what previous users have said.
It's amazing to me how people think Slack is this amazing tool. If someone had thrown millions of dollars at IRC, it wouldn't suck.
But instead, you'll fork over your personal info and insist I do too.