The one thing that I liked (and still like) about IRC is its federated server model. Maybe I need to do more research, but I guess I am assuming that slack is a for-profit company with private servers that they own somewhere that everyone uses ... or am I totally off?

If you're looking for "a better IRC" while still not tying your communications to a single data silo, Matrix[0] with the Riot[1] client is currently the best experience.

The brilliant bit is that you can set up your own homeserver which holds all your chat logs, can authenticate against whatever you like (internal username/password, LDAP, or even CAS single sign-on), and allows you to communicate with people and rooms on other homeservers without having to manually connect, create a dozen different accounts, etc.

I think right now, 50% of users are on the matrix.org homeserver and 50% are on their own homeservers. And the upside of everyone being on a homeserver is that everyone essentially has their own bouncer by default - no more having to set up ZNC on some random VPS on a user-by-user basis, you can always message anyone and they'll get your message whenever they reconnect.

Because of its federated model, you can also use it to communicate with other companies and customers as well as internal communications - something Slack/etc aren't really chasing after.

[0] https://matrix.org [1] https://riot.im

Alright let's go further ... so how is this different from XMPP rooms? (http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html)

XMPP can support all the other things you've mentioned.

While XMPP is wonderful in theory, in practice, it's very difficult to assume that any given set of client+server can support anything, especially once you're talking to people on other servers. Even things like the features allowing messages to be delivered to multiple clients, rather than only one, are rarely implemented according to the standard. Matrix has a reference server and client which supports the entire protocol, so any other implementation will hopefully wind up implementing at least the majority of it, or won't be used.

XMPP hasn't really played out to its promises. Pity, it's such a great set of technology.

There's something to learn from this - there's likely a "right amount" of anarchy, some goldilock zone where people can still be creative and unburdened but not so much that things become fractured, fragmented, and incoherent.

See "What is the difference between Matrix and XMPP?": http://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html#what-is-the-differenc...

> So yes Slack is to IRC, as the Ford Model T is to a Mercedes S-Class.

I think you mean the other way around.

You're correct. Fixed.

Sure, IRC might be the Ford Model T if you are using it with netcat and manually PONGing the server. But compared to a proper IRC client Slack really feels more like an E-Class.

Good luck handling 3000 concurrent buffers in slack, or even adding basic features like OTR.

In my opinion IRC is superior to Slack, so I really don't understand this argument. (You're assuming Slack is an improvement on IRC, when in fact it's a completely different platform.)

Then I'm sure you can appreciate the irony that I use Slack via:

https://github.com/rawdigits/wee-slack

It's more featureful than the native Slack IRC gateway.