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Comment by heckanoobs | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't explain why IRC can't compete with Slack or the other corporate messaging services.

Slack was a side project by a failing game company. Its growth was largely organic.

I think the original premise is right that user experience is more important than ethics or philosophy or whatever the heck it is we're talking about when federations come up

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IRC didn't by even have anyone trying to improve stuff until the IRCv3 WG came along, and now we're seeing massive innovation and adoption in short timeframes.

But the fact that nobody was working on it is also part of the same discussion: non-centralized services haven't had clear ways to incentive the time investment to develop them. The community and respect of working on open source has worked well enough for some developers to create and keep these projects sputtering along, but it never worked for the designers and product vision folks. One of the promises of blockchain-based decentralized projects is that they may be able to incentive their contributors by cutting them in on the potential success of the project. It remains to be seen whether that's workable, but it's an interesting idea.

Yes, this is a massive reason where donations of some form can be useful.

And it's the real issue — not enough people contributing.

But the point is: that hasn't worked. We've had plenty of time now to see that that model does not work very well. I'm at least somewhat of a blockchain skeptic, but what I do like about it is that it isn't just trying to solve this problem in a way that we know doesn't work very well; it's trying to find a new answer that might work better.

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