A better IRC client isn't going to provide chat history.
The real advantage of slack isn't even client its stuff like massive logging for e-discovery and single sign on integration. Admittedly not terribly appealing for FOSS but once you use it at work...
Also integrations in general are smoother in slack than in IRC. Someone has already written the bot and its a click away to install and it generally works.
Wait... did you just tell me to go fuck myself?
Which can also be done with IRC clients.
This is a video of a search system I built for the Quassel IRC client: https://dl.kuschku.de/videos/2016-09-16_04-03-36.mp4
Quassel is a distributed system, so you have a bouncer and client which integrate tightly, with clients for Linux, Windows, Mac, Web, Android, iOS, which stores backlog in a database.
This search system is a very simple one, and simply uses postgres’ fulltext word vector search.
For example I can have jenkins email build fails to slack in, oh, probably less than two minutes, I've done it before. From memory I make a custom email addrs in slack and tell slack which channel to feed it into, and then add that address to my jenkins that already sent buildSpam.
In IRC I could do it... google implies there's a ZenIRCBot project on github and probably many others. Probably there are bots and tools that google didn't immediately find.
Its not rocket surgery to use fetchmail and some kind of Perl IRC library to simply POP everything out of a mailbox into a directory /tmp/wtf and probably about 3 lines of perl to read all the files in /tmp/wtf, connect to irc on some channel, output what it found, and if successful delete the emails from /tmp/wtf. Then put fetchmail and the 3 line perl script into cron and away we go.
Looks like Zapier is kinda in between "I could do it" and "AAS"
There's a reason people like slack so much. It does a ton of stuff out of the box with no headaches. Nobody wants to maintain all that stuff.
So instead of paying someone to maintain it, you pay someone to maintain it who keeps all your data from you and prevents you from accessing it, and who admits he’ll read all your stuff.
How is that better again?
That said, IRCCloud already does it for free, in the cloud, just works™, and the Quassel people are also working on improving ease of use and deployment.
You aren't paying "someone" you're paying an entire company that is dedicated to making the application highly available, with all the bells and whistles, with zero hassle.
Really, if you think IRC is so similar to Slack, then why are so many companies, organizations flocking to it? There has to be a reason.
If HN has higher discussion quality than reddit, why are not all devs on HN instead? If Linux is better for servers, why are people still starting projects on Windows? etc...
The power of marketing, directly or word-of-mouth, is important. And a decentral community can never do as perfect marketing as a company can do.
There are IRC clients and apps, and third party integrations as powerful as Slack, and as easy to use. But you have to find them, install them separately – there’s no single combined effort to market a single "just works" solution, yet ;)
Slack doesn't prevent you from accessing your data, in fact they explicitly built exporting features.
We're talking about open source, so reading your stuff shouldn't be a problem. For proprietary, maybe, but even then, reading someone's private slack info would be highly damaging to their brand, and to what benefit?
with respect to something like e-discovery its all a matter of perspective. If this were true, which it isn't, I wouldn't necessarily mind, as the financial worth of combined ancient IRC logs is unquestionably a net negative value.
There is no such barrier for the current set of chat apps. Download > Login with google, start chatting with the person who invited you. Search history? File sharing? No need to remember anything about dcc/xdcc, no need to manage servers running bots, no need to manage anything, really; it's all taken care of by the nerds that run the service.
I think one might actually be able to build a business by building a Slack that runs on top of IRC, and releasing client apps that actually significantly reduce the flexibility that a standard IRC client gives you. If you can get the on boarding flow to invite -> download -> log in -> start chatting with the people you want to chat with, you could crush slack (assuming you had the marketing budget to compete with theirs).
I think, however, that IRC will remain in some ways as a small haven from eternal September (haha, yeah, I know). The barrier to entry is a feature, not a bug.
Someone did, it's called IRCCloud.
That's the entire problem I've been talking about above: Anything you can imagine regarding IRC already exists. The only issue is that you don't know about it yet, and have to find it. And without marketing, or any lists of what is good and not, this is hard.
It's a web/android/iphone client only, but it's IRC. The moment someone grows tired of the client, they can get their own.
They could schedule downloads to their remote boxes and wouldn't have to tie up the home phone line for three days downloading the latest warez from that guy who had an ISDN line and let 10 people(!) simultaneously download from his bot at a screaming 5k/s.
Now I can have all those things (including the equivalent of 1000 ISDNs), and I don't really use IRC anymore, young me would be so jealous.
(I haven't used either very much, so please correct me if I'm wrong.)
But yes you're right, nothing in the IRC protocol for it. There is something in IRCv3 to provide chat history but I don't know if it's even in the current version of the spec.
(You say "they're a client too" - I confess, I don't know what they are apart from a client.)
At the moment if you join a channel you can't read its backlog, no. They could implement it though if they used logs from their users... kinda wish they would. But hey.
Then I'm not entirely sure what you were referring to, when you said "IRCCloud can". Backlog from before you joined the channel is the specific feature that I was saying couldn't be done.
It's interesting to know that IRCv3 does have that support, so I was wrong about it not being possible. But if nothing implements it, it's not very helpful.
IRC and FreeNode channels have been the standard for communication and not for archival purposes. I use an IRC bouncer with my home server and I never look back through the thousands of communications except to see a reply to my question.
Why does a Open Source Community channel need archived communication unless it is just a few developers only chat?
That's not even wrong.