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The problem is that those communities chose to use Slack. And now they're locked in to a proprietary protocol controlled by a single company with perverse incentives for censorship.

In prior years those communities would've chosen IRC. But nowdays everything has to be pretty hand hold your hand for you (ie, host your images, assume you know nothing of how to participate on the 'net by yourself).

It is a zero-sum game. And Slack has done the embrace, they done the extend, and they've started the extinguish (by cutting off IRC bridges).




Slack is perfect for organizations, whereas IRC is not. And no, we're not locked into anything.


> Slack is perfect for organizations, whereas IRC is not.

Why not? Organizations can host their own IRC server(s). Won't that be better than relying on a third-party's services?

And if needed, they can write their own bots, clients, or even their own specific extensions to the protocol.


Because the last thing organizations eant to do is host their own infra for a chat, implement their own search for a chat, re-implement the bits, the hooks, the integrations for a chat etc.?


Hosting things on their own infrastructure is very popular for large companies. They tend to take security a lot more serious that the average startup.


True and that's why hosted services focus a lot of effort on compliance.

https://slack.com/security


Listen, you want to convince my boss to spend more on the infra. For in house chat w/ drag and drop file hosting, and boost my pay for now having responsibility to manage that, be my guest :)


> Slack is perfect for organizations, whereas IRC is not. How so?

> And no, we're not locked into anything. How so?


I wish there was a way to ignore certain users / bots, this is such a pain for me, it makes slack too spammy and noisy for me so I only ever read private messages.




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