You could also consider discord. It's popular in the gaming community but is capable of housing large discussions

That would work too.

Would definitely recommend Discord, although it's aimed at gamers, it seems to be an amazing all-round chat service.

Rooms are of an unlimited size and have all the core functionality like file & image sharing, code highlighting, "reactions", which we've come to expect but also focuses more on getting people to speak to each other. It's built on electron and is both really quick & also require almost no resources when running in the background.

It has code highlighting? This is news to me.

discord has become so much more than a gaming comms platform now. And rightfully so. It is an amazing platform.

Definitely, I use it for most of my comms. (Except for Telegram which I use for general messaging)

Or you could just use an IRC channel...

But that's old. I'm only interested in new new NEW!!

You have to admit, getting people on slack is much easier than getting them to join your irc channel.

Despite having to have Slack for work anyway, I find joining public projects' Slack channels to be too high-commitment, so I never do it. IRC? No problem. I also like that IRC somehow has both a less formal and a lower-BS feel/culture to it.

For non-tech people, yeah, it's probably easier.

I'd really like to see usage of Matrix/Riot instead. A federated, open network and you can easily bridge your existing slack channels.

Might want to try Riot. It uses a protocol called Matrix, which is the successor to IRC. What this means is that you're not tied to them. Also the web, desktop, and mobile clients are pretty sweet.

Does Matrix really have the userbase in place to start calling it an IRC successor so definitively?

It may be aiming for it, and I do hope we see an open chat protocol succeed over all the Slacks and HipChats, but calling it the successor right now seems a little disingenuous!

Don't see anything else around that fits that bill. They also have amazing IRC bridging - I have been using Matrix bridged into Freenode as my primary 'IRC Client' for almost a year now.

IRCv3?

It's more aimed to be a successor to XMPP/SMS - hence the focus on federation and mobile friendliness.

Edit: Note this statement is based on my talking to people actually at matrix, on the dev team.

Calling Matrix the successor to IRC, when there's actually new IRC standards in development, is very misleading.

Consider simply using matrix.org, no need for hosting anything yourself unless you want to

Hi, let us know when this is ready, i would love to join as well.

Consider matrix first.