I love IRC, I even run my own IRC network, but IRC in 2017 is indeed woefully dated.

To my mind we need something which is a little bit more mobile friendly- with support for replaying history etc;

IRC "could do this" with bouncers and such, in fact I do this myself, but it's not very clean- and if you see it from a protocol perspective it's all hacks on hacks.

A clean "IRC for 2017" style protocol would probably wind up looking a lot like matrix, so I'd rather we rally behind that.

My team uses matrix, it's loads better than Slack.

It's a shame that Electron isn't modular. I think there were some attempts to make modular versions that would lead to smaller bundle sizes and resource consumption. I think the reason why Slack is os successful with such a poor performing app is most people using the app have machines provided by employers and they're good enough to handle the app without issue.

That's always been the refrain for why released software doesn't perform well, and it was a problem traditionally mtigated by software testers with a wide variety of hardware. You see the same thing on the web with slow-loading sites that clearly weren't tested outside a first-class first-world 4G or wi-fi connection.

Props to Facebook for mandating low-bandwidth testing

Use Slack on the browser. Works great. No performance or resource usage issues.

Not sure why so many people use the desktop app. It's an Electron app so of course it will suck up everything.

Maybe https://github.com/42wim/matterircd could be useful.

Originally made for mattermost, but I'm adding slack support (currently in master and only basic).

Slack has an IRC gateway (or XMPP). You can use that and your favorite IRC client. In fact the most usable way is this way.