This is a tale SaaS vendors (which have strong presence in online tech communities like HN because they are software companies) sold very well, and it's probably true for many small startups, but for medium sized companies managing their own platform for something like Slack is completely doable and you will not have those big downtimes compared to Slack. Sure, you have to dedicate time and resources to it, and obviously is not "core business" although a chat platform is a pretty important component in an online company.

I would be surprised if you couldn't match or exceed slacks uptime running whatever alternative you want (IRC, mattermost, rocketchat, etc.) on a random dedicated server.

Hardware is quite reliable these days. And updates can be scheduled to be at a convenient time for the team.

Yes, but what if you're taking a few days off to backpack in the wilderness with no signal while it goes down? Who deals with the downtime?

If you are the only technical person on your team then it's of course not ideal and would require some further thought into making things redundant. But even that is easy enough to do with IRC (setup two servers, link the irc servers together, single DNS record that points to both servers - job done).

If there are other people on the team that have _some_ technical skills then they can fix it..

IRC lacks quite a few features compared to other solutions, but the reduced complexity does bring very low operational complexity.

IRC will be incredibly hard to use for non-technical people on your team. Mobile clients for IRC look like crap, and have horrible-looking ad bars. No integration with Google Drive, Github, or other things.

It's just not a business-friendly tool.

I'm an engineer and personally I'm fine with IRC, I'm just trying to be realistic here.

Is it really though? If I take a look at a random modern IRC desktop client - how is it more difficult to setup than say your email program? The amount of information needed on setup is about the same: server, username, password (in fact email can get a bit more confusing in big corporate email setups with differing imap and smtp servers, etc.)

Also there are plenty of modern web clients for IRC, such as https://thelounge.chat/ or https://kiwiirc.com/ (which is supposed to work on mobile too).

> your email program

Reality check: Most people don't use email programs anymore.

Also how do you get IRC to sync all conversation data, history, between your several desktops and phones, how do you send files, make calls, and thread conversations?

But clearly no one is saying that email is too hard to use and we should just use $something_else (or are they?).

And you are starting to move goalposts here.. first it was uptime, then it was operations and now it's features...

And what about those web based IRC solutions? They are even easier to use than slack, have combined history, file sharing, etc.

They are moving the goalposts because there are several and ultimately very many reasons why IRC won't work, they just didn't bother to think of all the reasons and list them at once.

Ultimately there is only one reason that matters: The person in charge of deciding what communication channel to use likes Slack/Teams/IRC/whatever.

Add to that the SaaS propaganda that hosting literally anything yourself is just too hard (it really isn't). Or this notion people are just too stupid to deal with anything more than the simplest possible web interface - Really? what do those people even do? Stare at Notepad all day? Of course not. They stare at various complicated software packages ranging from CAD, $spreadsheet abominations, SAP to various Adobe software packages. Sprinkle in a bit of hype for the latest new thing and presto.. </rant>

> Reality check: Most people don't use email programs anymore.

Guess you are not in enterprise.

I'd bet hard money that within epsilon of anyone using a desktop email client in 2020, and thus having one to set up in the first place...is in an organization with access to Microsoft Teams.

Who deals with the downtime if any other on-premises system goes down?

If you are running networks and software on site, and they are business-critical, you have people and a plan for this. Or you don't, and suffer the consequences.

There will always be more downtime on Slack/Discord. There are more users, more updates. Slack/Discord is a giant distributed system with nodes all around the world. An IRC/XMPP server on one machine that 100 people use is not going to crash unless intentionally.

People really over estimate the difficulty of running self-hosted systems with great uptime.

When self hosting you can get away with simpler systems that ends up being more stable and have higher up times for lower effort.

The reason you see cloud providers having issues is not because the thing is difficult, but because doing anything at huge scale ends up being difficult.

> it's not perfect, but I really honestly don't think I could match their uptime by self-hosting

This is such a common misconception. The services I self-host was configured by me, if anything goes down (which they very rarely do), I know the exact cause and have it fixed in minutes. When some company's cloud service goes down I'm completely at their mercy. I also spend very little time on maintaining these services, just security updates, which are mostly automated.

Bottom line, maintaining and self-hosting services that has 1 or a few users is much less complex than services with millions of users. Hence, my uptime is better than Google's, Amazon's, and Azure's, etc.