Slack people are closing down their XMPP and IRC gateways. The embrace period is over, now moving over to extinguish.

They're so intent on owning your user experience that you can't even read the announcement without signing in.

https://archive.is/hlUjg

I have a Slack account, so here's the lede:

> Saying goodbye to Slack’s IRC and XMPP gateways

> As Slack has evolved over the years, we’ve built features and capabilities — like Shared Channels, Threads, and emoji reactions (to name a few) — that the IRC and XMPP gateways aren’t able to handle. Our priority is to provide a secure and high-quality experience across all platforms, and so the time has come to close the gateways.

Then it goes on about their great screen reader support, and how their Real Time Message and Events APIs can be used instead of writing IRC bots.

/via https://web.archive.org/web/20180310133248/http://gwolf.org

gwolf also links to https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-57735-7_1 (front page links to a PDF with the actual content), which analyzes the phenomenon of free software projects organizing using centralized, non-free communication tools.