persistence, history, search, rich formatting, image previews, synchronization between devices, usable mobile clients, group/here/channel mentions, channel directory/search, channel descriptions, file upload/sharing (XDCC is not this), multi-line/expandable messages (eg, paste code or logs without flooding the channel), user status (away/DND).
Some of this can be approximated with bots, of course, but there's a lot of extra work then required to make that work (namely, setting up, writing and maintaining the bot). Some of this can be done client-side, but then you have inconsistent experience.. you don't know if the other user is going to get the image preview or if their client understands markdown or some other formatting, or is going to interpret and display your message using some other markup format. Some of this you can also work around with one of those persistent IRC connection proxies, provided each user gets one and that is also maintained by somebody.
Eventually someone packages this stuff all together for simple deployment.. and basically creates a bad clone of Slack, but with 10x maintenance requirement and so many more things that can break.
As long as you’re willing to run a bouncer (and an organisation could run one for all their users), there are usable mobile clients with synchronization between devices, persistence, user status and even profile images.
For example my app https://quasseldroid.info/ which requires you to run the https://quassel-irc.org/ bouncer, but provides all that. As well as IRCCloud and Weechat-Android, which are also very awesome and provide a similar amount of functionality.
This is kind of my point though, especially for a company: this is kind of a pain to setup for technical users that want to get the functionality. It's basically a complete barrier for the types of users who still primarily use e-mail, phone calls and in-person meetings.
I agree — the current usability is still very suboptimal, and we need to work on it a lot. But compared to where we’ve been a few years ago, it’s already gotten better.
I wish I could do more, but in the end, I’m just a single developer improving the usability of a single app in my free time.
For open source non-centralized solutions to compete with the proprietary options, you need lots of devs and even more funding. Matrix/Riot.im has that, and even they aren’t close to where Slack is. Most of us IRC devs are either getting nothing, or, as e.g. in my case, the donations don’t even cover the server costs.
In the end, if people want open solutions to grow, they need to put their money where their mouth is.
irccloud is great and solves many of these issues. I'm not suggesting it's an alternative to Slack because of course then you're paying them $5/user/mo instead of paying Slack $6.67/user/mo and you're right back where you started, but if you're an IRC user looking for history/synchronization across devices, image previews, a mobile client, and drag-and-drop image sharing, irccloud is IMO totally worth it.
persistence, history, search, rich formatting, image previews, synchronization between devices, usable mobile clients, group/here/channel mentions, channel directory/search, channel descriptions, file upload/sharing (XDCC is not this), multi-line/expandable messages (eg, paste code or logs without flooding the channel), user status (away/DND).
Some of this can be approximated with bots, of course, but there's a lot of extra work then required to make that work (namely, setting up, writing and maintaining the bot). Some of this can be done client-side, but then you have inconsistent experience.. you don't know if the other user is going to get the image preview or if their client understands markdown or some other formatting, or is going to interpret and display your message using some other markup format. Some of this you can also work around with one of those persistent IRC connection proxies, provided each user gets one and that is also maintained by somebody.
Eventually someone packages this stuff all together for simple deployment.. and basically creates a bad clone of Slack, but with 10x maintenance requirement and so many more things that can break.