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by scrollaway 3917 days ago
Slack and IRC are room-based, semi-synchronous, topic-centered communication protocols with support for direct messaging.

Slack literally took the concept of IRC and put a bunch of cool bells and whistles on it. They updated it, centralized it and sold the idea as an enterprise solution. It works great, and the tech could be a kickass replacement to IRC, done correctly.
1 comments
mikekchar 3917 days ago
I don't really disagree with you... but I often wonder how much Slack actually adds to IRC. We use it at work (and as a 100% remote person in a mostly co-located team, it is a godsend). I can't really think of anything in Slack that wouldn't be easy to implement with IRC bots.

Persistent history is easy. Email notification is easy. Storage of various assets like text snippets and pictures is easy. I've never used any, but I'm assuming that at least one of the web interfaces for IRC works well...

I think the main thing that Slack has done is package it up so that you don't need to cobble together 100 different things -- which is, of course, very valuable. Or at least more valuable than the monthly cost that they charge ;-)

To be honest, I would really rather be using free software. I would be quite happy to pay for a service that made it easy for me (as Slack does), but software freedom is valuable to me.

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scrollaway 3917 days ago
I've wondered the same. Like you said, though, there is value in packaging useful features together.

IRC is "You could do that ...", while Slack is "You can do that". So like you're saying, you could set up a bunch of channel bots (And for what it's worth, I think channel bots are fairly ugly. If I say "Let's work on #133", I want #133 to be linked, I don't want a different user spewing 3 lines of noise and a long link). But most people won't do that because it's too much of a hassle. So most of IRC does not showcase what's really possible.

Like I mentioned in the g+ rant I linked above, it'd be possible to improve this by adding scripting features and such to IRC servers. But nobody's doing that. The harsh reality is that "could" is a long, long way from "can".

> To be honest, I would really rather be using free software.

Me too, man. Me too. I don't use Slack out of principle, and I'm a heavy IRC user. Sadly it doesn't often compare :/

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