Let’s go back to 2013. Mike Monteiro was only halfway to giving up on Twitter and he was probably still enjoying some of the online-meets-real-life magic dust that made Twitter a rehash of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) for many of us the previous decade (and this decade, mind you; we’ve hired three people from IRC). I’m not sure when it hit me that Twitter was federated IRC — “federated” at the message level, not the service level — but it seems painfully obvious in retrospect. On Twitter, you don’t join channels and become part of a community, you “tag” your message with a channel (read: hashtag) and dump your message into it globally. A neat idea, but also one which prevents us from using Twitter for anything corporate. #accounting and #conferences can’t be namespaced to nilenso and Twitter isn’t open source so we couldn’t set up our own instance. Not that we even had this idea at the time; everyone loves a little alternate history.

But we did have the idea that we wanted chat to happen somewhere. In 2013, there was competition for chat: IRC, in all its monospaced glory, competed directly with the universally acceptable bastardization of email as an unstructured chat protocol. The chat tools of yesteryear, Google Talk chief among them, were a joy to use even on mobile devices as long as the only communications network graph you cared about was two nodes connected by a single line. One-on-one, today special-cased as “Direct Message”, was almost the only mode of operation. Almost the complete inverse of Twitter, group chat was not Google Talk’s forte.

By 2014, we had a long-standing #nilenso channel on Freenode, populated largely by me, kitty, and neena: nilenso’s only IRC users. We struggled to convince anyone else to join, to remember to keep their IRC client open, and to keep a bot up that would catalogue everything said in the channel. We tried Campfire, HipChat, and even considered writing our own IRC clients and servers, but nothing took hold.

Then came Slack.

2015 and 2016 saw us heap love on Slack. It worked, mostly. Chat history was persisted and, unlike HipChat, it even had mobile clients that worked and a search feature that sort of worked some of the time. Good enough! Sold! Everyone get on Slack!

We even convinced our clients to try Slack, where we could. We were actually doing sales for Slack and yet we knew, ultimately, we were paying close to $2000/year for the fanciest IRC client any of us had laid eyes on. Slack is little more than persistent IRC with a proprietary protocol. The UI is just adorable, though.