Which is a centralized, proprietary, web-based client. All three of which HN loves to hate Slack for.

It does have a really easy way to extract your conversations as a log file though. An OSS version of irccloud you could just "apt-get install blahblah" with may have stemmed the rise of slack, at least in companies.

I expect this niche will be filled by Matrix in the near future. Host a Matrix homeserver + Riot.im web UI, then employees can use Riot mobile apps and any Matrix-supporting client.

For the record, I don't like Slack very much. I just disagree that IRC or IRCCloud are acceptable alternatives.

IRCCloud was is its infancy when Slack came on the scene. If it had existed back then, maybe we wouldn’t have switched? I don’t know, but it’s way too late now. (I have never used it, and am just assuming the read state sync works as well as Slack, which may be a big assumption.)