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That seems to be a project waiting to be written. It's clear that IRC can be good enough but slack wins because of the smooth on-boarding for non-technical people.

I guess noone has built it because for techies, IRC is good enough, and there isn't a clear path to monetizing it?

The Lounge works rather nicely for non technical people, https://github.com/thelounge/lounge

ScoutLink uses it for kids with great success.

If you are going to write a new client for a chat protocol, why use IRC over Matrix, especially since Matrix bridges to IRC?

irccloud.com - always on. never lose history.

what webhooks/api would you like?