irc is so useful that i cant believe it is dying, and aside from freenode perhaps even dead.

so what killed the IRC? its not like theres any other alternative out there. slack seems to come close but its still very different and for a different purpose.

We use IRC sort of interchangeably with Slack at my work. The nice thing about IRC is you can host it on-premise and Slack doesn't have all of your company's confidential information. The downside is that it doesn't come bundled with a pretty webapp with GIFs and emojis.

There’s always Riot https://about.riot.im/ which is a nice and fully open source app so you could set that up on-premise too. :)

Not sure why you're getting voted down. I'm looking for something to replace hip chat at the moment (we replaced slack with hipchat as slack didn't work well for us either), so I'm genuinely curious why a suggestion for riot is unpopular. Anyone care to comment?

What part of slack didn't work out for you? We're using slack at my workplace - and I think it's okish. Not a fan of it being a web app - but not frustrated enough yet to try the irc bridge with weechat (which is on my todo-list. Seems like a sane way forward, the last irc client I used was BitchX, and I don't think I'll likely to trust such an old c codebase with anything if I can help it..).

Now that everyone "knows" what slack is, I wonder if it's time to blow some dust off of Apache (née Google) wave...