There's a reason why companies like Slack have built billion dollar businesses doing ostensibly the same thing as IRC, and it's because IRC doesn't offer enough value even if it's free.
I realise my setup is hardly common, and I contend that the main issues with IRC are the clients and the account systems. However, both those issues (among other issues) could be resolved with the IRC protocol, allowing people preferring other clients to continue to user their clients.
Message logging and account management can be done server-side (e.g. closing connections on users if they don't log in), and with a dedicated client to this server, the logging in-part could be done rather seamlessly, even if posing slightly more 'troubles' for other IRC clients.
But as implied in the other replies to my post, but is there any money in that? Maybe licencing the servers? I dunno. I'd love to do something like that, but it would be a full time effort, I fear.
At which point you're not really using IRC. You're using the Bittleebee-commands-over-SSH protocol.
This protocol has a number of issues: it requires having a server with a unix user account running on it (which is a massive attack surface, no-one can offer a server like that for free or it will be used to DDoS other people etc). Its phone apps are poorly integrated and drain battery. Its UI in general is very undiscoverable; the logging interface is still pretty awful (e.g. tracking of how far you've read is pretty poor). Sending files or voicechatting is even harder than it is in vanilla IRC.
> both those issues (among other issues) could be resolved with the IRC protocol, allowing people preferring other clients to continue to user their clients.
Slack offers an IRC gateway, which gives about as good an IRC experience as any extended-IRC protocol ever could.
As for Slack's IRC gateway, I think it's pretty decent, yes. I personally prefer it to Slack's own client (again, that's just me). But this is what bothers me about Discord, because that doesn't offer an IRC gateway, and I am forced to use their client(s).
And if you're like me - which apparently few are - and you are in many different communities, that use different protocols to communicate, having a bunch of different clients just means more hassle.
Probably the big one for me; I know my previous boss was asking if there was a SSO option because that would be the only thing he saw as limitation in IRC.
It's an open protocol. Check out Kiwiirc, it's pretty good looking! A decent front-end team could build a nice interface.
> There's no good account system so users can easily spoof being someone else.
I believe that NickServ takes care of this.
As far as logging, and file-sharing. Yeah you're onto something. IRC isn't as bad as people make it out to be :/
Of course. But they haven't. Kiwi isn't bad for an IRC client, but it's way behind Slack.
I believe that NickServ takes care of this.
Nickserv is hard for a typical user to understand. The number of times someone thinks they've registered a name when they actually haven't demonstrates that. Ghosting makes it harder too.
I used IRC for about a decade. I used even more esoteric online chat services like telnet talkers and MUSHs too. They're great if you learn how to use them. But that's the key difference - you don't need to learn Slack. It works how you'd expect it to work. A user can just pick it up and do things with it. That's a massive difference, and possibly the main reason why Slack can charge a decent price for their product.
Personally, I'd rather have accounting and permissions be a core part of the protocol, not a bolted on afterthought.
