> One of the biggest problems with IRC is that there is no immediately obvious way to jump into a channel and browse or search the history.
There are many solutions available to do this. Many channels publish chat logs publicly, which can be downloaded and searched using grep or your tool of choice. And there are web clients that can do this.
> Also, because there are so many IRC clients, and so many servers out there, one person's IRC experience can vastly differ from another's.
That’s rather the point of a protocol, no? IRC isn’t a platform, it’s a standardized way in which various clients and servers can communicate. Much like email, different clients support features useful for different users.
> IRC also doesn't have any of the modern amenities like emoji reactions or reaction gifs, comment threads, code snippets, plug-and-play third party integrations and web hooks, profile pictures, voice/video chat, screen sharing, or any number of a plethora of other features that BOTH Slack and Discord have.
I consider this a feature. I expect many others would. Constant reaction gifs / emojis / etc seem to be a distraction. I don’t believe I’ve seen these used in a way that had a positive impact on productivity, or effectiveness of communication.
> If you want people to use an open source alternative to Slack or Discord, then people need to build that alternative. IRC, unfortunately, is not it (at least not in its current aged state).
matrix.org / riot.im is what you want. The matrix protocol supports all of these features. Riot is an open source web client for it. I use it regularly and would recommend.