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It takes a lot of memory to slowly and jerkily send plain text over the internet, and not quite keep up with typing when autocomplete-ing usernames, you know. Stop expecting so much of your computers /s

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Things like IRC don't support embedded images, so lets build our own protocol with blackjack and everything else! Oh wait, its a slow morass :(

Except; with IRC it's up to your client to do anything it wants.

Want inline pictures? Well, Textual has had that for a long time, irccloud's webUI too.

mIRC takes 24MB!

I wrote an MSNP (Windows/MSN Messenger) client and used it for many years, all the way until Microsoft turned the protocol into a horrible XML-ised mess and then dropped support completely (as in, turned off the servers.) One standalone Win32 binary less than 32KB, usable from Win95 up to Win10; and over all the years I used it and noticed its memory usage, it was never more than 2-3MB. Yes, it had emoji support (though not very large ones, obviously.)

The amounts of memory that users are reporting for Slack are all several times higher than the entire RAM of the first computer I started using my MSNP client on.

I feel like you post is missing:

I had to walk 10 miles to school in the snow! Barefoot! Uphill! Both ways!

or

GET OFF MY LAWN!

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