I wouldn't call it sane.

Why do I have to sign up for different Slack organizations and have a different password for each one?

Why can't I private message someone on Slack with just a username?

I think Discord does this much better.

So, I preface this by saying that I do feel like Slack could have better authentication mechanisms, decoupling the account from the networks. But I do think that some of this is by design as well.

I think it is worthwhile to think of each Slack organization as a completely independent and isolated network. This is one way that they can reasonably give some security to their corporate customers. I don't believe that there is any intention to ever lat you send a blind message to someone on another Slack organization, but maybe I am wrong there.

It would absolutely be nice however for me, as a user who is in multiple organizations, to be able to log in one time and have all of them be connected.

I'm in multiple organizations, but some are against different email accounts, some use an external SSO and some don't. Were Slack to give a single login I would probably NOT be able to connect to the multiple workspaces I do now, which is a major benefit to me.

I'm guessing because of deep technical debt from some very early decisions made.

Yes. As of a couple years ago at least, Slack was a monolithic PHP app that could support a few thousand users in a single team. Each “workspace” was assigned to a server and scaled vertically. LinkedIn notoriously had two Slack workspaces in order to support all of their users, and I’m guessing other large companies have had to do the same.

I’m sure Slack is using their vast resources and large team to solve these problems at this point, but it probably hasn’t been easy to create a horizontally scalable system from the early codebase, especially when the data model was designed for a single team of users.

I would assume so as well. Maybe a Slack engineer can chime in?

I got downvoted, I think one of them chimed in.

Discord also has amazing performance. I guess it's because gamers would be mad for something like Slack eating up all the computer's resources.

...and push notifications, and offline message history, and a mobile client, and services that aren't hacky god-clients, and content storage, and previews/inlining, and....

About the only thing IRC has going for it is decentralization, and that's not very valuable in the market it seems.

Seriously. IRC has had 30 years to get with the times. It's stagnated and been lapped by its competitors, and the efforts to improve it didn't properly start until Slack and friends simultaneously re-cooked and ate everyone's lunch and dinner.

> push notifications, and offline message history, and a mobile client

https://irccloud.com has all these, done really well.

Offline message history you get also by running a server somewhere and just having an irssi in a screen/tmux.

Still my favorite protocol and I have some channels that I consider to be my favorite social network for about 10-15 years already.

I pay for irccloud, but most people don't. It's annoying trying to talk to someone who disconnects when they shut their laptop and will never receive your message. Not very good tooling to build a community or relationships, that's for sure.

Having to pay for basic features that competitors like slack/discord have is exactly why the slack community for something is often much bigger these days. Even the larger communities like #node.js are really just 10 regulars.

For example, Elm's slack is vibrant. Elm's IRC channel is dead. This is the reality for most communities I've been joining these days.

Depends where you chat. Some rave/techno channels are still very active since the last 25 years. For English speaking crowd, at least #haskell, #rust and ##ibmthinkpad are having lots of discussion every day. But maybe it's just me. I've been using IRC since 1995 and I see it much nicer compared to the centralized bloat of a chat Slack is.

Great point. You can add these features for yourself with IRC, but Slack guarantees that the other party also has those features.

But it gives up decentralization (and privacy) and still requires that you have a server to connect to anyways (read: server to set up and manage).

And on top of that, the behavior of irccloud from the standpoint of everyone else is identical to that of a bouncer like ZNC. It's yet another hack around the fact that clients don't exist in IRC unless they're online.

sooo convor/grove? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grove.io

Also , infinite scroll back , a standard set of easy to use clients, hosted services and API integrations.

I fail to see how those things should be part of the protocol. That's like complaining HTTP doesn't support tags for your bookmarks. It's so out of scope.

Unless, of course, you are talking about a user-friendly service offering IRC access to those who do not want to set up their own clients.

So, something like IRCCloud, which does exist, fyi.

Infinite scrollback is only possible with support from the protocol: if you assume that partitions happen between two servers or between the client and the server, then the client will not be able to see every message that happens so cannot provide the scrollback.

Okay. So why isn't IRCCloud better than Slack?

I can’t convince my colleagues to use IRCCloud at least people will put up with using slack.

Rocketchat has much more feature parity to slack tbh. Comparing slack to IRC isn’t really fair even though they do the same thing.

I have used irc and slack and slack’s ease of use is its asset. I used freenode in high school and college to teach myself scheme. The barrier to entry is not something that can be explained as just use IRC.

Disagree about barrier to entry.

I run an office hours chat for my online classes powered by IRC. I use KiwiIRC as the front-end.

Students need only the web address of the web page I want them to go to. When they get there, they need only a username.

No signup, no verification, none of that. They're online, getting help in seconds.

Individual public channels requiring nickserv registration and all that? that's another story.

But seriously - the barrier to entry to get started is this:

https://kiwiirc.com/client/irc.freenode.net/?##irc_can_be_ea...

> cherryh.freenode.net set mode +ns ##irc_can_be_easy

Some welcome message. You may be too used to IRC to recognize this, but this is frightening gibberish to 99.99% of computer users.

Also, this interface does not get you crucial features provided by other chat services, such as seeing what previous users have said.

IRC is an open protocol. Messages like what you see can be hidden by the client or suppressed by the server. And free intermediary servers can keep logs.

It's amazing to me how people think Slack is this amazing tool. If someone had thrown millions of dollars at IRC, it wouldn't suck.

But instead, you'll fork over your personal info and insist I do too.