[dswalter]

Native emoji support, aesthetically pleasing front-ends, and clear product direction are some of the main positives I see, even if the combination of php on the backend and electron on the frontend aren't the most sophisticated technical components in history.

I prefer decentralized and open things, but a cohesive vision can sometimes provide a better user experience across a more restricted set of functionality than an army of hackers, each solving their own problems.

[mynewtb]

Offline messaging, mobile clients, push notifications, history, search, rich text formatting, message editing, file transfer, etc etc etc

[rkuykendall-com]

..., inline images, display names, deleting messages, editing messages, reactions, avatars, multi-user private messages, etc etc etc

[hs86]

Have you tried IRCCloud? Their web based front-end is as nice as Slack's but it still works with decentralized IRC servers. They also manage the client's state (unread messages) better than regular IRC bouncers.

[detaro]

Emoji seem to work just fine on IRC nowadays, what do you mean by "native" support? The shortcodes? The fact that there's official clients you can entirely rely on supporting it?

[rkeene2]

Native emoji support, pretty front-ends, and clear product direction are possibilities on-top of IRC (or XMPP) since their absence isn't a core part of IRC (or XMPP) -- it's just not a good way to make a profit it if you don't lock down the network and act as the gatekeeper of the interface. Slack's API is fairly open though and it's not a huge hurdle to interact with it. I built an IRC<->Slack gateway that bridges the differences fairly well ( https://slack.tcl-lang.org/ , you know, if Slack were working).