[always_good]

I pay for irccloud, but most people don't. It's annoying trying to talk to someone who disconnects when they shut their laptop and will never receive your message. Not very good tooling to build a community or relationships, that's for sure.

Having to pay for basic features that competitors like slack/discord have is exactly why the slack community for something is often much bigger these days. Even the larger communities like #node.js are really just 10 regulars.

For example, Elm's slack is vibrant. Elm's IRC channel is dead. This is the reality for most communities I've been joining these days.

[pimeys]

Depends where you chat. Some rave/techno channels are still very active since the last 25 years. For English speaking crowd, at least #haskell, #rust and ##ibmthinkpad are having lots of discussion every day. But maybe it's just me. I've been using IRC since 1995 and I see it much nicer compared to the centralized bloat of a chat Slack is.

[squeaky-clean]

Great point. You can add these features for yourself with IRC, but Slack guarantees that the other party also has those features.