Years ago, my company used an internally hosted XMPP server. When you joined a group chat from another client, it would replay messages that were sent while you weren't connected (or possibly some fixed time period of messages).

That is the MUC room lastest messages logs. When you disconnect+reconnect fast you have them all the time.

With Nayego, we are working on that. https://nayego.net/ you can subscribe if you want to see the preview.

Persistence can be created the the right proxy/helper and clients

As much as I love IRC, this argument seems to me to not be that different from the "just use rsync/ftp" Dropbox argument. There is this IRCv3 extension proposal, though: https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/pull/292

I agree. I think it's just normal, human self-centeredness. Because it's easy to them it's easy. I work with 95% non-technical people. They aren't going to tackle the problem of IRC persistence on mobile devices when they can just use Slack. :)

This is a common refrain of IRC users who don't know what it's like to have real, convenient persistence that works for everyone.

Nobody has made persistent IRC channels that are as usable as newer chat products that don't try to be IRC.

BNCs provide a semblance of persistence. But the real problem with IRC is smartphone persistence, I think irccloud is the only service that solves this. But alas, it isn't free.

So can this be solved for free? Is it even a good idea to solve it?

thelounge is an web based IRC client with persistence like irccloud, except that thelounge is open source and self-hosted.

https://thelounge.chat/

A web-based client is not going to provide adequate persistence on a smartphone.

Lounge works fine on a smartphone because the actual IRC connection would be handled by a server where you host it, not your own phone.

Do you get notifications when you are mentioned on your phone though?

If your browser supports web push spec, yes!

> Persistence can be created the the right proxy/helper and clients

As others already pointed out, that requires technical skill and fiddly configuration.

It also doesn't help with the specific scenario of jumping into a channel you've never been in before, and being able to get all the history of that channel.

I frequently have to jump into the channel for another team, provide some input around whatever the current issue is, and then I generally leave. I don't care to see/read about whatever that team normally does. With Slack, that's dead easy - join channel, I can scroll up and see the rest of that conversation, then talk a bit, and get out.

There's also a ton of other features, like threading, editing message in-place, and persistent file attachments that either arn't supported, or require some kind of custom implementation - or depend upon IRCv3.

We also make heavy use of various integrations - our customer support team gets pinged in-channel when certain events happen in their support platform, which has Slack support built in.

Our deployment tools notify teams that need to be aware of new releases and links to resolved issues/new features.

So, yes, we could cobble together something that does all of these things - but this is a major undertaking.