I really wish IRC and other open protocols had a chance against Slack and the entire walled-garden ecosystem. Personally I'm highly willing to do some extra-setup in order to at least own the history of all my messages (not to mention the ridiculousness of separate Slack groups requiring separate logins) - of course this is a developers take, which excludes all the other employees..

Ultimately the Out-of-the-box some setup required has in as much doomed IRC as desktop Linux. The obvious problem being that the people that are interested in working on these things for free are nerds who are okay with the setup -- which just perpetuates a closed-cycle.