I think part of what keeps me from getting too personally invested in Slack (or Discord. Or any other commercial chat platform) is that I've seen so many commer

I think part of what keeps me from getting too personally invested in Slack (or Discord. Or any other commercial chat platform) is that I've seen so many commercial chat platforms come and go over the years (I think my company has averaged 3 years per platform so far), while IRC is older than I am. I just don't expect any commercial chat platform to have a real long-term future because of the financial friction in keeping it running. But who knows, I grew up alongside computers so maybe the past thirty-something years were just the growing pains and Slack will be "it" for companies for the next thirty years.