I pay for IRCCloud, but the problem is that it only fixes everything for you. It does you almost no good when nobody else can receive a message after they close their laptop or go through a tunnel.

The IRC communities speak for themselves. Pretty much all regulars, no new blood, tiny, and opinionated grouches that are kinda hard to stand. You'd think #javascript or #node.js on Freenode would be pretty big. Nah, I'm on there every day and it's about 10 regulars. I could list off the usernames off the top of my head.

To put that in perspective, my Slack community for people who like building MUDs has more regulars and it's hard for me to think of a smaller niche. If you're trying to set up a community and you think IRC is good enough and you refuse to offer alternatives, your stubbornness is only disserving your users and community.

I can think of many more options too, like how Elm's IRC channel makes you think nobody uses the language, yet Elm's Slack community is thriving and more fun to participate in than #javascript and #node.js, and is far more popular.

Ease of use is definitely a big factor. It would be interesting to see if it were possible to try to build a community using IRCCloud first and basically use it as "Slack but with an irc gateway that will never go away". Their free tier modalities seem a bit too restrictive to allow that though.

That used to be the story. I used to offer a Mibbit gateway to my IRC community that got a lot of use 10 years ago.

But today, it's a hard sell. IRCCloud doesn't compete on features against alternatives services, it's strictly worse since it has less to work with.

When a user adds your community, it gets added to a list of all their other servers on Slack/Discord. The question has become "so why are you making us use this instead of setting up a Slack/Discord/etc server like everyone else?"

And I think you'll be hard pressed to answer them in a satisfying way. And for no real gain.