If I had read this message before we started our project I would have agreed with you much more than I am right now. That's not to say I completely disagree wit

If I had read this message before we started our project I would have agreed with you much more than I am right now. That's not to say I completely disagree with you either, I don't. Originally we tried to build something on top of either IRC or XMPP. But, it turns out that a system like Potato (or Slack, if you like) is less a messaging system and more like email, or a wiki. Messages are persistent, searchable, and editable. You can attach files to messages, and for some kinds of messages you can even have interactions like votes. None of this is part of IRC which is designed to be a messaging system where a message is sent, and after that it really doesn't exist anymore (other than in the scrollback of the users who happened to be in the channel when the message was sent). When testing Slack, I used to be really frustrated about their horrible IRC support. I still am, but I now understand why they don't give it much attention. It's really not compatible with how these systems work. I'm definitely not against IRC. I'm always on our Potato channel but I'm also on IRC. After all, I wouldn't want to leave #lisp or #emacs. As for XMPP, it suffers from many of the same issues as IRC. However, it does have an extension mechanism that could be used to support features such as persistence but as far as I know there is no standard for this, which means such standard has to be agreed upon, which is what I called for in the last message.