131–140 of 499 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That page/project desparately needs a bullet point list of what it wants to fix with IRC.
Agreed, but here is the list of specs: http://ircv3.net/irc/
Please for the love of god just don't use Slack. We have learned absolutely nothing. Let's all jump on the bandwagon of another closed-source, proprietary, walled-garden service and hand over all of our private intra-company communications to a private third-party in another country. GREAT IDEA.
So you don't use GitHub or Bitbucket, then?
For everything else, including at work, I/we use privately hosted solutions like GitLab, where we control our own data.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good luck pretending than "setting-up your own IRC server" is easier than not having to care about such a thing, and that most people really enjoy to have to "choose from a multitude of servers, services, clients, bots, client scripts, bouncers, and myriad of bots" instead of just going to https://slack.com/downloads The article does not even discuss the fact that projects that opened a slack community with a big inc…
You're correct, I understand why most people don't want that, and thus also why Slack is so hugely popular. I'm primarily thinking about technical people who actually do want this (such as what's referred to in the article, people working on open source projects or who otherwise require things not offered by slack).
I want to spend my time working on React, not be a sysadmin for the irc bot. I switched to botbot.me and it's been always up and with a much better interface :)
1. Slack is a well-designed interface for allowing teams to communicate via chat.
2. Slack is easy to install is use on Mac, PC, iOS, and Android. It Just Works™.
3. Slack doesn't require me to install IRC somewhere. Which also means I don't have to worry about how people gain connectivity to said server when outside the office.
4. Slack has whimsy. Fun colors, messaging, emoticon, bots, etc.
All of this is what folks in this thread seem to be missing. I've used IRC for a very long time, but have NEVER been successful at getting wide adoption of IRC for communication.
I am well aware that I'm trusting a third party with out information. I'm aware that alternatives exist and you can get them to work. That doesn't matter when I have to try to explain to my CEO how to /join #channel.
There is a reason why IRC, a widely-available, chat solution that has been available for decades didn't catch on. It has nothing to do with how well the software moves messages from one computer to another.
If IRC were good enough to handle the needs of small software company communication, people would use IRC . Sitting here pretending everyone just doesn't know about a 20+ year old technology is comical. The "IRC Features" section bugs me, too. Unless you run a private IRC server IRC has a long, tortured history of design-based security difficulties. Gone are the days of netsplits permanently owning channels, but the…
It is reasonable to raise the point that building FOSS software while using a closed piece of software as a core tool bears consideration. However, I am 25 and largely missed the boat on irc. I decided to start using it ~1 year ago. It is hard to use, but we will look at that in a minute. Often, we assume people have as clear an idea of what we are talking about as we do. That is often not the case. Let's explore IRC…
Frankly, it boils down to that I just don't like it. I'm more interested in getting better at programming, or learning about containers, or some other useful thing, than trying to figure out IRC's odd interface. Chat isn't something I should have to think about. It should just work.
So, I agree with most of what @vonklaus said, and disagree with the links pro-irc stance.
I've never used Slack, so I have no opinion on it.
I like Slack's default-to team member privacy but you can implement these features without compromising that. I opened a case with Slack about it but they closed it with the standard "consider it in the future" response that I expected (which I don't hold against them, I can't say I wouldn't have done the same). It may take a breach of Slack's infrastructure and subsequent leak of private chats for them to make the changes needed for organizations to protect themselves from this.
It might only take user education to protect a company from this, but in the end if you're a big enough organization there are going to be people that don't care, hate the organization or are just to jaded to take the ramifications seriously.
We just recently met with a VC who was impressed with our platform pitch, saying he hasn't seen something large in our space that's open source yet. Slack specifically came up as something that Andreessen Horowitz made a big bet on. I'm not going to say much (unless someone asks) except that:
* It's open source and on GitHub (http://github.com/EGreg/Platform)
* It is designed to put control back in people's and communities' hands. It should be installed by communities, or they can choose us to host, like wordpress.com does
* Each community can release its own client app, BUT you can also have client apps which provide a seamless experience ACROSS communities and let you do identity + connect with friends + get notifications across communities!
* This was not easy to build. It took us over four years.
We started before Diaspora* and we built an open platform on which app developers can build apps which communities can install, and which can aggregate social experiences across communities. The apps can be ANY social apps and the platform takes care of all the underlying details, including app versioning, user identities, "finding your friends" in each new community, registration/password stuff, email / mobile notifications, native app integration and caching, and much more.