[gcv]

On the subject of IRC: it wasn't fading all that strongly, IMO, at least for open-source and free software discussions. Then Slack came along. Startling to see a proprietary clone of IRC (albeit with some nice extra features, namely history) come along and start taking over. See, e.g., the Clojurians Slack community.

[bsder]

> Then Slack came along. Startling to see a proprietary clone of IRC (albeit with some nice extra features, namely history)

Really? I wondered what all the hype about Slack was.

So, Slack is basically Colloquy, but for Windows morons and Linux weenies.

That's depressing.

[omgbear]

It's pretty much a hosted IRC server with a decent client and a really nice, extensible bot.

They have a way better client than hangouts for OSX, about the same on android.

[mike_hearn]

It's also got basic wiki type stuff, and some other features.

IRC is like USENET: It has barely evolved for decades, nobody can profit by improving the protocol as it's a commons, so it just stagnates and dies out.

Eventually all the decentralised protocols that were born in the early days of the internet will be gone.

[caf]

The IRC protocol is in a different situation to USENET, because the latter has many different independent, individually federated networks of servers, whereas the latter has just one.

This means that server-side innovations can and do happen - they just need to respect the basic server-client protocol. Often the newer features are delivered through "services", which means they're in-band signalled.

[gcv]

Not entirely. Team control is a major part of it for companies, and history makes a huge difference to the experience. Slack servers allow the use of IRC clients, but I gave up on Colloquy almost immediately after seeing the benefits of history. For the right teams, the IRC+history combo can almost completely eliminate email use.

Also, Slack bought a company which did voice, video, and screen sharing. Since join.me went downhill, this will be a welcome addition to Slack.