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Comment by herbst | Hacker News Reader

How would work related IRC work in practice? Everyone running their own bots so you dont miss messages? You also need a bot for push notifications, as well as one for mirroring. Also a custom solution for file sharing. I know its part of the fun.

However it does not sound suitable for a work environment.

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The only value of Slack is receiving messages independent of presence (no need for a bot to keep you online), providing server-backed message history, and providing a UI that allows modern creature comforts like emoji and native images. If those are baked into an IRC client/server combo that achieves broad adoption, we might well see IRC come back as a "poor man's Slack".

No need for chat history bots if you front-end your IRCD with a web interface that has chat history, persistence. [1][2]

[1] - https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge

[2] - https://github.com/convos-chat/convos

We used to have a centralised bouncer that both fixed push notifications as well as transparent history and presence (i.e. automatic away). File sharing has been part of literally every client for so long I don't know what you want me to say about that. It works, it's p2p. What more is there?

$oldjob had that too, and it worked really well for most people - tech and business alike. I like IRC because it makes you focus on what really matters instead of some sort of seamless Giphy or Wikipedia "rich"-content integration. It's sufficiently async to not bother me at all times, and I can interact with it programmatically very, very easily.

Also, due to its rigidly ephemeral nature (ultimately depending on your personal preference of course, but the default for most clients these days - and opposed to something like Teams, which seems to store everything forever), it nudges its users to use a more suitable, more permanent medium to capture information that is to be persisted. It's clearly a different kind of animal than a wiki or an email archive/mailing list, whereas new "alternatives to email"-tools like Slack, Teams and their ilk are anything and everything in-between, which causes "now where the hell did I read that thing about that other thing..."-syndrome for me.

Well, when someone does not respond on IRC, send them an email.

Still nothing?

SMS?

At this point, maybe they are not responding for damn good reasons?

I check my work email once every 4 days on a good week, and my personal email nearly once every 2 months. Email isn't really a good channel for urgently getting in touch for some people.

True. And when discussing generalities, it is a given people with specifics will stand out. I have mine, you have yours.

Personally, I deal with others on whatever terms they tend to present to me.

So, if someone does not respond quickly, fine. Or they want SMS, or whatever, that is fine too.

I figure they have reasons, seek low friction amd give consideration I am given.

https://www.irccloud.com/pricing see "Teams"

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