Every year or two there’s a wave of people in the #drupal world bemoaning the move to Slack away from IRC. I can sympathize, but I “we all communicated so much better” and “it was easy to find people then” takes are… definitely looking at IRC through rose colored glasses.
“Back in the day” the same thing used to be said about splitting #drupal-support out from the general #drupal channel. And then the explosion of project and initiative specific #drupal-whatever sub-channels that emerged to keep smaller groups in touch.
To some extent it’s about scale: once a community gets large enough that there are more than a few dozen people trying to actively discuss stuff simultaneously, “one big IRC room” and its associated feeling of shared community turns into “trying to chat in times square on NYE.”
Slack definitely has shortcomings. For OSS projects an alternative that’s libre-free would be great, because as much as I like Slack it’s VC funded and subject to the vagaries of its business model. It’s risky to treat it as “true infrastructure” for OSS communities.
But the problems I see people citing with Slack vs IRC are mostly about nostalgia for a time when the project was smaller, more intimate, less formalized. When the project lead and the newbie both hung out in the same room and talked shop.
If there’s a sense that splitting the channel into #foo-dev and #foo-support harms community cohesion, it’s worth asking whether growth is something to encourage or avoid and whether more deliberate steps for inclusion and cross-pollination should be explored.