I, I just have to mention that IRC had these archives so repeat questions had a corpus to search. The walled gardens don't.
For my teams the "modern" solution is Mattermost. My (biased) feelings are that it's 10x better than free-slack and 100x better than paid.
It did? I used IRC pretty frequently back in the day, and the only logging I ever saw was through your own client. This was in the days of dialup, so you'd miss any conversations from when you weren't logged in. If you were fancy, you'd have a bouncer set up on an always-on remote server to log messages when you were away. But I never saw any centralized logging à la Slack/Teams/Mattermost. It's certainly not something supported by any IRCd I'm aware of. Maybe a few channels had custom bots that logged everything to a centrally searchable location, but I never saw such a thing.
Indeed, some here even tout the "ephemeral nature of IRC as a feature, not a bug." [0]
I miss the old Internet.
And get off my lawn!
I still don’t understand what slack can do that IRC and a few bots can’t.
Here's Ubuntu: https://irclogs.ubuntu.com/
For many businesses, this is a feature, not a bug.
Internal communications are discoverable in litigation. If you have records, you can be compelled to turn them over.
I used to work in healthcare. Internal messages had a maximum retention of 30 days. That wasn't driven by IT or the users. That was a decision made by legal. In that space, you are always being sued by somebody. The lawyers want to minimize exposure and that's a fight they're basically always going to win.
To be clear: it's better if that's a decision made by the business. But it's also one of those cases where what the decision makers care about isn't necessarily aligned with what the users care about, so there's ultimately not a lot of incentive for Slack to care.