I think this is pretty silly. Anyone that has actually used Slack on their team - especially if they've built integrations - will know otherwise. It is unbelie

I think this is pretty silly. Anyone that has actually used Slack on their team - especially if they've built integrations - will know otherwise. It is unbelievably painful to build integrations that cater to the regular client (users want forms, buttons, dropdowns, etc) that have clean fallbacks for text-only clients (at best 1% of your users). The real reason they're dropping support is because it will make it easier for developers to build in their ecosystem. That's it. That said, we shouldn't let Slack off easy - there are many basic issues that seem to plague Slack and Slack alone (ex. I can't believe this is an issue, but it seems nearly every message I try to send through iOS rich notifications fails to send). We should demand better, but an IRC or XMPP gateway is not the fight to pick. P.S. If you're in high school, you should join our relatively active Slack community at https://slack.hackclub.com https://slack.hackclub.com - started as an IRC community and switched when our members started demanding a decent mobile client.