I think he was talking about HN users who argue that IRC does everything slack does.
He's definitely honing in on a group of people who should support federated solutions and instead evangelized the opposite. Ironically there's a similar frustration with using the proprietary GitHub service rather than open source git sites like GitLab
That's the right answer, I'm very skeptical of people saying "this can be done in XMPP" but when it comes to the actual implementation it falls short
Edit: also note the author updated the article and Emoji Reactions are still not supported in XMPP but are in development
^ this.
A lot of people are so mad at Slack and extolling the virtues of XMPP and IRC and fully forget that there are about zero clients for either XMPP or IRC that have the same functionality (consistent across multiple platforms) as Slack.
Yes, I'm fully aware of exactly one client for Android (Conversations) that supports mobile-friendly XEPS. And yes, I'm fully aware of IRCCloud, a closed-source, proprietary 100% web-based product on top of IRC (all the things that people seem to hate about Slack. Go figure)
My understanding is that many of IRCCloud's Slack-like features are based on the open IRCv3 standard. If this standard ever takes off (fingers crossed...), IRCCloud will have a lot less vendor lock-in than Slack does.
Hard to imagine it will for Slack's audience. Slack is serving the case for the non-technical folk extraordinarily well right now. A significant amount of their user base doesn't care about standards or IRC channels. They just want a consistent, well-designed product that does the things they need it to for work. They've never opened a terminal in their life and they don't need the terminal-irc-gateway that this recent change has killed off.
But many IT departments require on-premise hosting, which Slack doesn't offer. Users don't care about open standards, but maybe their sysadmins do. If IRCv3 can capture this audience, it has a chance to co-exist with Slack.
Less and less IT departments do that now, since so many things move to the cloud. When you have all your stuff in Gmail and Google Docs already, having Slack is a no-brainer.
In the meantime people will chose other platforms that provide better and more consistent experiences.
E-mail is about as terrible as IRC and yet it just won't die.
At least with email you're able to send messages to those on different "networks".
That's very true. Products fail. So instead of blaming others for failing to provide integrations, I would look at what made these products popular in the first place. Unfortunately most discussions around XMPP and IRC rarely actually discuss this.
Speaking of Skype. You can actually see how management fails to understand the popularity and features of other communication platforms in each release. It's funny and sad at the same time.