I&#x27;ve been using IRC for over 20 years, on and off, these days mostly for work. I also use Slack and Telegram daily (and both of these have persistence).<p>I think built in persistence is hugely valuable, and together with that and IRC clients with up to date UI&#x2F;UX are the key things IRC has been missing. Sure, you could use irccloud.com or something similar, but it still feels old school. IRC has pretty much been dying a slow death for mainstream users as other messaging apps took over.<p>Considering Slack is now valued at $3b, yet is fundamentally IRC with persistence, nice UX and lots of integrations - I&#x27;m surprised the guy who originally wrote IRC - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jarkko_Oikarinen" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jarkko_Oikarinen</a> - didn&#x27;t take it further or see the potential to raise funding for a commercial product more recently.<p>I would also be interested in seeing some kind of completely decentralised persistent IM architecture, maybe using blockchain. This looks interesting <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matrix.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matrix.org&#x2F;</a>