IRC has always been free and you can search as much as you've logged...
One thing that a lot of people seem to have difficulty understanding is just how little space text takes up; someone typing at 120wpm continuously for 28h has only generated a little over 1MB of text. No doubt Slack is taking advantage of that lack of understanding to make people think the costs are greater.
Server side history and SaaS frontends is the biggest misfeature of all the modern chat services. (and corresponding lack of client side history logging)
Every single time I have to join one of these new chat systems I have to figure out ways to copy the archive of messages on the platform over their often private http APIs.
There's no way I can use a chat service for business communication without having an archive of communication. If you join a foreign workspace you don't even have an export option (or it's surely is well hidden).
With XMPP/IRC clients, you can at least log locally and don't have to deal with bloated webapps you can't even control the basics on like disabling typing notifications, or online status tracking.
I have no idea why you wouldn't mind that, but thats fine, you do you. I am curious though, if you don't mind sharing why?
To everybody else who are hit by this, they would not consider it a feature but a pretty serious limitation, since if you didn't care about server side logging in first the place why would you mind messages disappearing after 90 days?
Regardless though, IRC also doesn't persist user names which I think is a serious limitation.
Replacing slack with IRC really doesn’t feel like a sincere proposal. Slack has persistent history for everyone, push notifications, image and other file uploads, audio calls, video calls, and screen sharing. And all of that works with no configuration or research.
The only way it’s going to fly is if your organization is entirely hacker types.
I did work at one company where the main means of communication was an IRC server on the intranet. Calls were done through VoIP and file sharing was via the usual shares --- usually the coworker's machine, but central servers were also available. Of course this was a company that specialised in networking and communications products, so perhaps they were more inclined to do such a thing (and we "dogfooded" all of our products too), but nonetheless it was a great experience.
Yeah, even if file uploads are disabled and limited to sharing links (e.g. from Google Drive), screenshots will be very useful for communication, for a long while.
I can grep through the logs if I need to find something. That's really really fast compared to their search on the website.
I also get other advantages such as not automatically being forced to see all the reaction GIFs and being able to silence notifications from certain users that abuse them.
One of my main concerns about IRC, for the average user, is the lack of good modern clients. IRCCloud is pretty good, but that's also sort of missing one of the point with IRC, to me at least.
That being said, it's not like Slack has a fantastic UI either... Actually it's horribly confusing.
One thing that a lot of people seem to have difficulty understanding is just how little space text takes up; someone typing at 120wpm continuously for 28h has only generated a little over 1MB of text. No doubt Slack is taking advantage of that lack of understanding to make people think the costs are greater.