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?->building facebook clones->building twitter clones->building slack clones->?

This does look like a good product though. Personally I like the style of this more than slack at first glance. Running your own server and being open source are awesome. I can't wait to see what people build on it.

Isn't Slack an IRC client with some project management features?

No, Slack is an IRC alternative (you can connect to it with an IRC client, but you lose many of the features) with assorted bells and whistles (emoji, adding reactions to posts, easy management of private rooms, etc), a bunch of integrations with other services, and persistent and fully searchable history.

That last one is really the key feature to me.

Sorry, I don't mean IRC client as in uses the same protocol, but rather that it primarily does what an IRC client would. I think it's great they've found success though.

I thought that was 1999.

Everything is a cycle.

https://xkcd.com/927/

The worst part is, all those systems (we can't say clients anymore) don't even try to standardize anything. Which is understandable, because they feel like they're improving the usability situation. All they do is provide bridges to other solutions, but that's not helping on the protocol side.