IRC doesn't have chat history and a bunch of other features.
Personally I see that as a feature. Chat is ephemeral, discussions/texts that aren't should be saved elsewhere anyways, otherwise it gets lost with all the other ephemeral stuff.
That's true, if you're not connected, you don't receive messages.
> even after you reconnect?
That's not true, once you're connected, you start receiving messages again.
> For many that’s not very useful.
Yeah, I understand it isn't useful if your perspective is that you should be able to read what happened when you were away. But I guess my previous point is that people shouldn't have to do that, there should be another resource for catching up what happened when you were away, and instead it should be OK to return without having to read through all the messages.
- Use some software project, want to ask a question, see they have an "IRC channel" - Hopefully it's a hyperlink to an IRC web chat, or else they'll have to do a lot of research to find out what IRC is - Join the web chat link, see a room with a list of names - See no messages - Ask a question - Wait ten minutes, get no reply - Assume it's just dead and leave
The ability to see older messages would be a huge boon, and to see messages between connections as well. I've seen it happen that a user joins a channel, they leave because nobody talked to them, somebody answers their question after they leave, they rejoin, they ask the question again, then disconnect.
I wonder why such thing wasn't done 15...20 years ago. Now it seems to be too little too late, with Matrix more or less having been taken the place of IRC.
Or maybe we would have been anyway because adding more and more complex features to federated, open-protocol systems with many actors involved with different, maybe even competing interests is not easy at all.
But also if I think back at late '90s, IRC had almost the needed critical mass and non-tech users to become something more mainstream...