[skewp]

You've been able to directly send files over DCC via IRC clients since like 1995.

Interpreting and displaying those DCC'ed files or cutting longer messages into sub messages and recombining them is something that you could implement via the IRC client just as easily as it was implemented in Slack (not to say that it would be easy, it'd be a lot of work, but it likely would not be much more work than what took to make that function in slack).

If you're modifying IRC anyway, you can modify the server to record logs and make those available to clients.

Same goes for editing.

IRC is not as bad as you think it is, and it wouldn't be an insurmountable effort to make it as good as slack, but open sourced rather than proprietary, which was the entire point of the original article.

[tptacek]

No. In Slack, files and images posted to channels are content associated with the channel, not a private and opaque stream of bytes tunneled over another protocol between two specific channel members. The comparison between Slack and DCC is silly.

Given the problem of sharing a diagram with a team of developers on a group message channel, I'm sure there's someone here who would say they prefer the DCC option of receiving a named file and then opening it with a file viewer, rather than simply dragging the file into the chat window and having it appear instantly to everyone on the channel. The existence of that person is not interesting to me.