You don't have to be a developer but you do need a level of technical background higher than that of the average computer user. There are plenty of tech-savvy, non-developers who can get up and running with things like IRC. There are plenty more non-technical users who can't. Or at least wouldn't given the learning curve time commitment.
I'm the only person in my family who would be able to sign on to IRC in under an hour whereas they'd all be able to have slack up and running in a matter of minutes.
Unless the technical skill of the average computer user has decreased substantially in the last 10 to 15 years, that shouldn't really be the case.
It's amazing that when it comes to computers, it is somehow acceptable to be dumb. It's acceptable to not learn new stuff. It's acceptable to not read in order to understand stuff. As can be read in the comments here.
The whole ethos of startups and Silicon Valley has been around finding a market for your product. If people don’t want to use it then you can’t blame anyone but yourself.
Feel free to chat with yourself using an ideologically pure system... it’ll be lonely though.
Disclaimer - A FLOSS dev here.
If you were talking about using these protocols over a telnet session, then I would be more inclined to agree with that statement, but just installing an application, entering a server name and account credentials (the latter of which aren't needed for IRC), and connecting isn't any more difficult than creating an account on slack and connecting by entering the address in the browser.
Regular users have amazing blind spots. Also you’re not giving slack enough credit for their smooth onboarding process.
Of course, but I don't think that Slack has done a better job with this compared to previous solutions. In a lot of ways, it's worse given its performance issues. For example, I never experienced UI lag in a chat application until I used Slack (comparing it with UIs like a GUI IRC application, AIM, ICQ, MSN messenger, Yahoo messenger, Skype, etc). Second, auto-completion and search do not work like they do in previous chat applications (or other applications in general) due to infinite scroll and the default of doing a global search instead of just limiting it to the chat or group. Third, the fact that you're forced to join some channels because you were invited or can't leave a channel because you're the last one in it are other issues that come to mind.
As much as it annoys me too, it appears that people actually using it have enough tolerance for it that it doesn’t matter.
Granted, I have not used IRC for a while, but last time I checked, the story for getting message history was "start a irc client inside a screen session on a server you own". And there were no mobile at all.
(I remember writing a script which exported chat logs from my desktop client to text files available over HTTP... I'd then visit those pages from cell phone to see if I had any more messages. This is not the experience I would wish on anybody)
It was pretty much the same thing with newer chat services like ICQ, AIM, MSN messenger, etc. (though I think they started offering offline messages in later versions).
As for mobile, my older Nokia phone had a Symbian IRC/XMPP client that I could use without any issues.
I know plenty of non-technical people who chatted on IRC who were not developers. They just used the mIRC client on windows to do that. They also managed to configure their email and news clients to send and read email and browse usenet.
I simply don't understand where the idea of needing a technical background came from for using something like IRC.