I setup Mattermost for my company. The deciding factor between Mattermost and IRC was effort to get non-technical users a nice GUI. Functionally, IRC would have won.
Additionally not being able to share images as a feature? I guess everyone will do the three step upload to imgur first.
In my world - if I could get away with less different clients I would. It makes it a nightmare to support.
Imagine this:
You have a bot in your channel that accepts an "upload-image" command followed by a base64-encoded string representing an image (or a series of these commands if line-lenght is limited, I'm not sure about this part of the IRC protocol). The bot checks that the image is actually an image (to avoid weird injection tricks), saves it on the server and returns a link you can share or sends the link directly to the user/channel of your choosing.
This can be automated with a irc client, of course. Users using old clients will receive an actual link, users of this supposed new client see a clickable preview of the actual image inline.
And of course it was automated. There are any number of such clients. Slack. Facebook Messenger. WeChat. Viber. Dozens of them. Of course they don't use IRC. But they automate file delivery. And media inlining. And dozens, if not hundreds of other things.
Meanwhile the "nothing stops you from implementing" crowd implements nothing and keeps wondering why basically no one uses these wonderful open protocols.
That's a feature for me. If I wanted to be constantly barraged with images, I would have stayed using Facebook and Twitter. People on IRC posting imgur links gives me the opportunity to accept or decline (usually based on their reputation, the channel's response, or my boredom). With other social networks, images are almost always unsolicited and often only waste scroll space (good luck to those still on limited data plans and want to know the context of the latest notification).
Besides, text often can have more substance and precise meaning (even if it's not perfect all the time). After all, we're all communicating with mostly just text right here. Another example of something else that features mostly text are books, so it's certainly not deprecated.
Give me all the text please - in fact, if you give me an image with a caption, I'll read the caption first. I can happily find images through other mediums so IRC without embedded images isn't a problem at all here.
Maybe I'm missing the point here: But IRC does have a file transfer feature, so what would stop people from sharing images just the same way like plenty of "content" has been shared over IRC?
