How often is Slack/Discord down? I mean it's not perfect, but I really honestly don't think I could match their uptime by self-hosting, as well as more on-call rotations for something that's not core product.
I very much prefer that for something that isn't core product, if it goes down I need to do exactly nothing for it to come back up, and that the engineers at Slack will be starting to work on it likely before I even realize it's down.
Hardware is quite reliable these days. And updates can be scheduled to be at a convenient time for the team.
If there are other people on the team that have _some_ technical skills then they can fix it..
IRC lacks quite a few features compared to other solutions, but the reduced complexity does bring very low operational complexity.
It's just not a business-friendly tool.
I'm an engineer and personally I'm fine with IRC, I'm just trying to be realistic here.
Also there are plenty of modern web clients for IRC, such as https://thelounge.chat/ or https://kiwiirc.com/ (which is supposed to work on mobile too).
Reality check: Most people don't use email programs anymore.
Also how do you get IRC to sync all conversation data, history, between your several desktops and phones, how do you send files, make calls, and thread conversations?
And you are starting to move goalposts here.. first it was uptime, then it was operations and now it's features...
And what about those web based IRC solutions? They are even easier to use than slack, have combined history, file sharing, etc.
Add to that the SaaS propaganda that hosting literally anything yourself is just too hard (it really isn't). Or this notion people are just too stupid to deal with anything more than the simplest possible web interface - Really? what do those people even do? Stare at Notepad all day? Of course not. They stare at various complicated software packages ranging from CAD, $spreadsheet abominations, SAP to various Adobe software packages. Sprinkle in a bit of hype for the latest new thing and presto.. </rant>
Guess you are not in enterprise.
If you are running networks and software on site, and they are business-critical, you have people and a plan for this. Or you don't, and suffer the consequences.
When self hosting you can get away with simpler systems that ends up being more stable and have higher up times for lower effort.
The reason you see cloud providers having issues is not because the thing is difficult, but because doing anything at huge scale ends up being difficult.
This is such a common misconception. The services I self-host was configured by me, if anything goes down (which they very rarely do), I know the exact cause and have it fixed in minutes. When some company's cloud service goes down I'm completely at their mercy. I also spend very little time on maintaining these services, just security updates, which are mostly automated.
Bottom line, maintaining and self-hosting services that has 1 or a few users is much less complex than services with millions of users. Hence, my uptime is better than Google's, Amazon's, and Azure's, etc.