IRC is a technical detail like SMTP or TLS 1.2 (or XMPP), and should be treated as such. That there are numerous pre-existing clients is beneficial for those who already have a preference, but as evidenced by Slack, the number of client programs available is far from the most important feature.

It would be really neat to create a IRC server that bundled supported web, desktop, and mobile (ios and android) clients with first-class support for that last 5% of features, but I'm doubtful of how much money there really is to be made. People are cheap, and Slack is "free" - I mean, it's actually not free for the organization, but users don't pay a monetary price to download the client to use the system, so I see charging users money for high quality IRC clients as an uphill battle.

I really like the idea of slack; However, what happens with slack is that it gets misused.

It becomes an alerting system, task tracker, logging system, code review system and I could go on...

IRC is for realtime communications, other Comms are better off on GitHub Issues etc.

My experience has been slack gets abused.

> It becomes an alerting system, task tracker, logging system, code review system and I could go on...

I haven't had this problem at all. We do have certain notifications trigger Hipchat alerts, but they also send out emails, etc. - Hipchat is just a convenience for that.

Maybe it's a Slack problem but not a Hipchat problem?

IRCCloud, Quassel.

All of that exists, and can be used.

No, stop. Please.

I was a huge proponent of IRC but the lack of developments the past... decades has killed it for me. Discord is straight up better. Yes it's proprietary, but no, IRC is just not a good alternative at this point, it hasn't kept up.

And I love to death what the IRCCloud guys are doing but it's just not good enough to use as a proper communication tool especially in a company.

Admitting this is the first step to fixing it. If you want open source alternatives to win, you can't get stuck telling people the things they like aren't worth supporting. I like the fact that I can do text, voice and video in the same tool; that I have a searchable message history; that I don't have to manage the server myself; that I can make interesting bots with a webhook system and a websocket API; that I can interact with people programmatically over an OAuth2 API; that I can use markdown in messages, embed files and youtube videos, pin messages; that I can manage large communities using a thorough group and permission system (I'm managing a Discord server that has 20k+ people on it, this is stuff that can't be done over IRC quite simply).

And you know what, I like the custom emojis too.

Quassel isn't good enough (speaking as someone who loves quassel). IRCCloud isn't good enough (speaking as someone who loves IRCCloud and heartily recommend everyone here to support them by buying a subscription).

I used to say: Our best chance is that Hangouts is open sourced. Nowadays, I'm rooting for Matrix but I think our best chance is that Discord is open sourced. These protocols, they get developed with very little awareness of what people actually want -- they copy features left and right, try to either support everything and end up a bloated or unusable plugin mess (XMPP) or support nothing and end up unpopular. Most of them are toys. In the end, we need serious players, passionate about creating not just protocols but good interfaces to them. This is hard to find in open source.

None of the features you mention are useful for actually communicating and getting work done.

Your concept of "better" is distinctly different from mine. In my world, software without completely useless and unnecessary features is better than bloatware. irssi + tmux + logging + grep works great for 100% of actual not-embedding-useless-cat-videos-to-avoid-having-to-actually-get-work-done use cases.

In the interest of adopting your own borderline-uncivil tone: Stop assuming objectivity in your notion of evolution and improvement being the same as everyone else. It's not. Just stop. Please.

> None of the features you mention are useful for actually communicating and getting work done.

I respectfully disagree. It's incredibly helpful to be able to video/voice call a coworker instead of typing back and forth. It's also incredibly helpful to be able to quickly past a screenshot of an issue you're seeing, or to paste a quick snippet of code, or log, with nice formatting.

Yes, I could use my phone or another app, and I could paste my image to imgur and share a link, or point them to github - but that's another step, another roadblock on the road to communication and understanding.

> It's incredibly helpful to be able to video/voice call a coworker [...]

In my experience it is pretty rare in software development to have the need for a voice/video call. There are use-cases but they are rare and better handled by a specific software.

> It's also incredibly helpful to be able to quickly past a screenshot of an issue you're seeing [...]

And also painful. Sometimes I get screenshots from terminal screens showing error messages and have to retype them when e.g. grepping for keywords in source.

> [...] quick snippet of code, or log, with nice formatting [...]

If it's short just blob it into the chat window. If it's long then please use some paste service, as screenshots of logs are a nightmare (see previous point).

> [...] but that's another step, another roadblock on the road to communication and understanding.

Why is there another step? You can have multiple programs, tabs, terminals, shells, sessions, etc. open at the same time.

For developers that might be true that voice/video call is not happening often but I don't think that other business functions would share the same perspective. The ability to call, video conference and easily share images and docs is an important need for collaboration in Design, Marketing, Product Management and as a PM I often had to share screenshots back with engineers to illustrate what I'm talking about. Then, from my experience large orgs do not want to have multiple chat systems that compete with each other internally, so they'll take the one that offer more versatility while being also easy to use.

Disclaimer: I'm an ex-Atlassian (Product Manager) and my feedback is genuine, coming from experience. I'm also super happy to see my ex-co-workers getting Stride out but my opinion is not a Marketing plot. Software now requires the collaboration of many different roles, many of them who would prefer Slack/Stride over IRC.

> In my experience it is pretty rare in software development to have the need for a voice/video call

And in mine, it's very common! I lead a distributed team, and frequently it's easier and quicker to move from text chat to voice in order to explain something.

You should check out Riot.im, a Matrix client. It's great!

And that is why I and many others are working on adding exactly that into today's IRC clients.

Why I'm working on copy-paste of images and long text for quassel.

Why people are working on WebRTC via IRC.

All this is coming.

Why not XMPP though? Why hang onto IRC? I mean sure this is cool but it's client specific features with no standardisation of the protocol (correct me if i'm wrong).

If I have to install a special client (quassel) to access these features how is that any better than installing a XMPP client?

Only thing IRC has going for it is the existing userbase, most of who run clients that won't support these new features.

Actually, all these features are being standardized into the IRC protocol. That's the good part.

And we've got all the developers of all the major IRCds and cloents together, working on these things. In contrast to XMPP, where support for an XEP between clients is spotty, and in contrast to Matrix, where a single dev team runs the server with ~50% of global users, builds the clients, and servers.

I agree that XMPP is a better protocol, but with the people we have, we can, long term, change the IRC protocol, too.

Is it IRCv3? http://ircv3.net/ Is the plan to update RFC 2813 and RFC 1459?

Either way neat, and good luck. Like it or not, IRC is certainly going to be around for a long long time. It's going to be a long time before you get project devel/help channels to move elsewhere!

> All this is coming.

And when it gets here, then IRCCloud and Quassel would be a good answer to my original comment. But now, those clients don't provide those features, while Slack does.

I’m writing on these things right now. They’re going to be in Quassel at least before the end of the year, on desktop and mobile. In developer builds they’ll already be in in a few weeks or a month.

And almost all functionality already is there anyway, as said.

> And when it gets here, then IRCCloud and Quassel would be a good answer to my original comment. But now, those clients don't provide those features, while Slack does.

Then help implement it. There’s so many companies and communities that are paying millions for slack, but never paid a cent on developing for IRC.

The only company that ever funded anything for Quassel for example was Nokia. And that obviously ended ages ago, it’s all volunteers now.

Except it's not going to be part of the standard, and there's no way that I can guarantee that the other people in the chat room are using the same thing.

It doesn’t have to be. You just need copy-paste to a pastebin or upload site, and need clients to support embedding content.

Then it doesn’t matter how each client does it.

This already works between Textual, IRCCloud, QuasselWebserver, and a handful more.

So now I need yet another service, which may not be accessible to the other people.

I'm going to stick with the one that does the things that I want it to do now, and doesn't require me to hope that the other person can see what I'm trying to post.

You mean, you’re going to stick with the one where you rely on a central authority, all your data is accessible to them and the intelligence agencies of their country?

There’s a major tradeoff to be made there.

You need to go where your community is. If your audience is primarily on IRC, you can't just ignore it.

At the end of 2014, I was in a solid ~40 irc channels and active in maybe 15 of them.

Today, I'm in 10 and active in none. All the channels I left, even some of the ones I'm still in now, have switched to Discord, Slack or Matrix. The two only channels I care about are actually both mirrored on Discord using the excellent Matterbridge (https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/).

I was a heavy IRC user. The audience is gone.

Except I have no guarantee whatsoever that anyone else in the chat is using those.