This is kind of my point though, especially for a company: this is kind of a pain to setup for technical users that want to get the functionality. It's basically a complete barrier for the types of users who still primarily use e-mail, phone calls and in-person meetings.

I agree — the current usability is still very suboptimal, and we need to work on it a lot. But compared to where we’ve been a few years ago, it’s already gotten better.

I wish I could do more, but in the end, I’m just a single developer improving the usability of a single app in my free time.

For open source non-centralized solutions to compete with the proprietary options, you need lots of devs and even more funding. Matrix/Riot.im has that, and even they aren’t close to where Slack is. Most of us IRC devs are either getting nothing, or, as e.g. in my case, the donations don’t even cover the server costs.

In the end, if people want open solutions to grow, they need to put their money where their mouth is.