> it's very widely used by a really huge, diverse range of people.

Well you must be around cooler people than I am. Today, if someone wants to start a group chat with persistence (I'm surprised you seem to think this is useless), without having to bother with setting up their own server, IRC will not be on that list. But there is a large group that wants this, and its increasing, because people don't want to bother with a bouncer.

> Your original comment said 'the days of simplistic IRC protocols are gone' and then you gave a bunch of features with the implication that simple protocols can't handle those features.

This is a bit similar to FORTRAN's situation. FORTRAN can still do the things C++ can still do, but you don't see people using FORTRAN. IRC is a simple protocol and is simple, until it has it be used for increasingly complex features and also being adopted for the web requires all sorts of proxies and workarounds.

> I didn't say that IRC itself, in its current incarnation, solves those problems.

What are you saying then? You said people can use IRC now for all the features I talked about, but then now you changed your stance.

Then what solves those problems? I think Matrix solves those problems, so what do you think is a better alternative? Does it have a community comparable to matrix? Say so and I will switch right now. The guys working being matrix know what they're doing. HTTP transport isn't the fastest, but it is simple to implement for a web developer. And with more and more people preferring in-browser clients, I saw HTTP as a good choice.

> Ultimately you're basically saying 'I want a couple of features and because slack provides them, I'm going to justify my use of slack by comparing slack to the least featureful chat thing out there: IRC'. IRC's strengths aren't its features, it's its openness, familiarity, hackability, conceptual simplicity and community control. In fact, the things people that like IRC dislike most about it are the few parts that aren't open, hackable, simple or controlled by the community.

Are you aware of what my first comment you replied to was about? I was replying to someone talking about how Matrix is a 'bad protocol for business', further saying:

>I don't think you're very familiar with chat protocols if you think it's even remotely suitable as a replacement for IRC.

I never recommended slack. Completely against that actually, and I'm rooting for matrix.

> I don't particularly like IRC as a protocol. Maybe its time has come, maybe the replacement will be called 'IRCv3' or 'IRCv4' or called something else. Whether that replacement is called 'IRC' is not important. What is important is that it remains open (in spirit and in practice), hackable, simple and controlled by the community. Slack replaces a distributed, network-failure-proof system (IRC) with a centralised, corporate-controlled, paid, closed, proprietary solution. That's the worst possible collection of properties. Yeah you can search messages, yes it has a nice user interface, but that's about it.

Holy cow. I've been linking to matrix and Riot links, how did you still think I'm talking about slack? I was talking about how slack is getting the mindshare of OSS communities and that's not good.

>I can't tell if this is a joke.

No I assure you it's not. You linked to a single web client. That's not the same support for emoji's as matrix's.Those are emocodes, and on the big list of supporting clients here[1], I see only IRCCloud (which is the same web client you linked me to) implementing it. No other IRC clients does this.

> This is 100% purely a user interface feature

That's why I listed the clients I use - Hexchat and weechat. Please share the easy code that can add those features to them. While you're at it, licensing it with a FSF approved license would be much appreciated.

[1]: https://www.webpagefx.com/tools/emoji-cheat-sheet/