[dlojudice]

The real tragedy isn't IRC clients, but that IRC missed its chance to become the dominant decentralized protocol before Slack/Teams took over. The core issue wasn't just tooling. IRC's protocol fundamentally lacked what modern teams need: native multimedia support, seamless file sharing, persistent searchable history, and rich formatting. While IRCv3 improved extensibility, it didn't address these feature gaps. It seems that IRC's simplicity was both its strength and fatal weakness. Great for tech communities, but too bare-bones for mainstream adoption. I feel that we traded decentralization for features, and now we're stuck with proprietary silos

[plastic-enjoyer]

> IRC's protocol fundamentally lacked what modern teams need: native multimedia support, seamless file sharing, persistent searchable history, and rich formatting.

Aren't this primarily client- and server-related issues and not something that is an issue with the protocol itself?

[anthk]

Jabber it's that, and it had been around since nearly 20 years.

[adtac]

this is just XMPP and it has been around for years before Slack was even a thing

Slack won anyway for the same reasons most centralised, commercial, closed sourced products often win: less fragmentation, more marketing, stronger network effects, simpler onboarding for normies, richer integrations, and most importantly, an enterprise sales team that actually showers

[babycommando]

its still got the underground vibe tho