I've been using IRC for over 20 years, on and off, these days mostly for work. I also use Slack and Telegram daily (and both of these have persistence). I thin

I've been using IRC for over 20 years, on and off, these days mostly for work. I also use Slack and Telegram daily (and both of these have persistence). I think built in persistence is hugely valuable, and together with that and IRC clients with up to date UI/UX are the key things IRC has been missing. Sure, you could use irccloud.com or something similar, but it still feels old school. IRC has pretty much been dying a slow death for mainstream users as other messaging apps took over. Considering Slack is now valued at $3b, yet is fundamentally IRC with persistence, nice UX and lots of integrations - I'm surprised the guy who originally wrote IRC - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarkko_Oikarinen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarkko_Oikarinen - didn't take it further or see the potential to raise funding for a commercial product more recently. I would also be interested in seeing some kind of completely decentralised persistent IM architecture, maybe using blockchain. This looks interesting https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/