The lack of familiarity with irc from slack only users seems to reveal an unfamiliarity with irc being a connected universe of many slack sites being on one network.

The Lounge is a web client, so you can access it from any browser (PWA, push notification support). Since your IRC connection runs on a server, roaming and connection drops is not a problem.

https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge

Aka a bouncer?

Yes, but baked in. Bouncers are horrible UX and a huge obstacle to onboarding.

"this service is only usable on your phone if you also sign up for another service" pretty much makes it a non-starter.

And logging and services that aren’t hacky god clients and user accounts as first class and...

IRC has had literal decades to be improved and only now do people get serious about it after Slack and friends sucked all the oxygen out of the room.

Older isn’t necessarily better either. IRC has stagnated hard, about the only thing it has on the competitors is that it’s free.

> ... it’s free.

And doesn't require 8 GB of RAM to run a client.

Ha ha that's crazy talk! Eventually they threw my IRC server off of EFNet because 8 total megabytes of ram for the server+OS was too little for the working set.

>about the only thing it has on the competitors is that it’s free.

It's more than 'free'. It's an open standard. You can write a slack client in your favorite language and it will continue to work for years.

Slack does not compete with that.

^"[IRC] client and it will work for years" ?