> No one uses IRC anymore, certainly not teenagers.
Really? People of any age will use whatever the group is using to talk with, because that's where the talk is happening. Most teenagers don't use Slack either, but will if the group notes say use this. There might be some "no one uses" argument because usage has dropped off almost everything since web searching got a lot better. There are fewer lingering people because most answers are readily available. Remember TLDP days? Search is so much better now.
We're not on about general IRC though, just for semi-private use where Slack would have been an IM tool.
> And I'm sure you're smart enough to see obvious differences between email and a real time chat platform.
How is email not a real time chat platform? I see plenty of chat happening on mail lists, and I certainly can't out-type email delivery. Sure, mail sometimes needs a DNS lookup, sometimes has anti-virus/spam filtering too. Maybe that's better for public chat systems anyway.
Thinking more about it, I'd rather have maillists than a web/electron client.
I'm not on about using email for all IM (but it could be), I'm on about more useful messages that you'd want searched later. "Hey, I'm doing X on Y day, here's what you need to know", most of the time this sort of thing gets missed in a IM flood channel.
I don't see much difference between Slack/Teams etc and IRC or maillists, just the tools that existed before are much lighter and have so many more clients you can use the one you know already most of the time.
No one uses IRC anymore, certainly not teenagers.
And I'm sure you're smart enough to see obvious differences between email and a real time chat platform.