IRC is fully customizable with plugins written by hundreds of people. Sure, you won't get "threads" or emoji responses to individual responses, but it's possible to add a number of features.
You can enable logging and write everything to the same system as the server. For individuals, the best thing is to set up an IRC bouncer that everyone can connect to and preserve messages.
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IRC. It's free, easy to set up and use and easy to maintain within a small organization.
A lot of people like IRC. I am not one of them. I’ve never found it to be particularly pleasant to use, if it’s very feature limited.
IRC is fully customizable with plugins written by hundreds of people. Sure, you won't get "threads" or emoji responses to individual responses, but it's possible to add a number of features.
If I'm being honest, I don't want to do a lot of work customizing anything. I want pretty good out of the box.
You could also try Mumble or Matrix. I'd stay away from Slack, Discord or other proprietary services.
I think emoji responses are really valuable, and this is not sarcastic.
Is it still not possible to fetch the offline history in IRC?
You can enable logging and write everything to the same system as the server. For individuals, the best thing is to set up an IRC bouncer that everyone can connect to and preserve messages.