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If only there were a venerable, decentralized instant messaging system we could use, perhaps some kind of internet relay chat system...

</sarcasm>

You reap what you sow. Depending on Slack for your communications is a bad idea. I can't even remember the last time any of the IRC networks I frequent had a total outage.

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Irc left out federation when the spec was crafted in 1984. It was deemed to bandwidth heavy.

Jabber/xmpp was a good step in the right direction. Too bad it overused plugins and bad extensions and XML abuse. Would have been loads better had they though far enough in advance.

It's not federated, but it is distributed and fault tolerant. The protocol is open and widely implemented and the implementations are mature and stable.

I mean, Slack isn't federated either. I don't know of any chat platforms that are federated except Jabber. edit Gchat and AIM federated in 2011, but AIM is dead now, so...

So you are saying people should sow discord?

No. People should use IRC.

In practice, all the attempts I've seen at getting a significant number of non-techies in a company to use IRC have failed. At one company, we almost got everyone on Jabber, but it was never used much outside the tech circles. Slack? Everyone is using it and most seem happy about it, and it does a lot more than IRC.

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