[mr__y]

While you are obviously right, I still believe that the MVP one weekend project I described in parent post would still cover a large fraction of use-cases. You could then improve on that and add some "minor" (minor in the sense of dev-time) improvements like syntax highlighting using some free (as in beer) libs for that. I am not trying to imply that I could "clone" Slack over the weekend by putting together ircd+elastic and then adding some JS cruft on top of that. But I do imply that just that would be enough as an MVP and as something that would make usage of self-hosted IRC possible for a wider, non-technical audience. I also believe that this itself would cover the functionality actually used by many slack users (at least my personal anecdata from 8 smallish companies supports that) And I also can't stress this enough: I am not trying to say that Slack was created over the weekend or devalue a really impressive and massive effort they've put to get the scale, the functionality and the UX.