> 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