I've been an IRC user since 1996 and still going strong. There have been many chat networks that have come and gone, but IRC, by virtue of being a protocol rath

I've been an IRC user since 1996 and still going strong. There have been many chat networks that have come and gone, but IRC, by virtue of being a protocol rather than a commercial venture, lives on. These days, I use Textual on OS X which has a very clean interface and things like in-line images and videos combined with ZNC for logging messages while I'm away. I log in and they all come up, if I want older ones I use the backlog module with /bl #chan <num lines to go back>. Granted it's not as elegant as scrolling up in Slack but I don't tend to need it often. I'm even connected to my friend group's Slack via IRC so I never have to open Slack itself! I find the idea of piping in various things into IRC intriguing and something I've been meaning to implement. It's trivial to get a Python/Perl/etc script to connect to an IRC server and spit out some information. Long live IRC!