Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

drewdevault.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 499 posts

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#191

Post by zanny »

Somewhat tangential but relevant, what the hell happened to XMPP, period? Wasn't it supposed to be our one communication account we do groupchat, video calls, IMs with persistence, and file transfers over? Why did it just up and die with nobody working on it and nobody using it?

http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html exists. Its groupchat, it could probably be amended to support inline code, and its persistence model lets a server chose to broadcast the message history or not.

And it is incredibly more user-friendly to make an XMPP account through a GUI client, have username@server, then join group@server for groupchat. No /join, no /register, no port management or #channel management. Hell, any reasonable XMPP client would default to your current server for groupchat so when you click "join chat room" you get the server part prefilled and you just enter the group name (or pick it from a list of groups - the protocol supports channel announcements).

I get that XMPP is a horrible format (XML) and horribly bloated (committee) and horribly old (1999?) but if its that broken why can't we make another protocol for peer to peer realtime communications? Why isn't webrtc becoming that transport? Why do we keep getting these one shot web startups trying to replace open protocols every other weekend for a quick buck?

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#192

Post by upofadown »

vjeux wrote: post #163
KirinDave wrote: post #130

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…

IRC usage stats are really bad. Steady decline from 1 million users in 2003 to 400k in 2012. In a time where we're talking about communication apps with hundreds of millions of users, not even having a million is pretty telling to me. http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/04/24/irc-is-dead-long-live-ir...

A lot of IRC usage used to be purely social. So the fact that that are lots less users isn't really indicative of anything in the context of FOSS development.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#193

Post by scrollaway »

RyanZAG wrote: post #179
scrollaway wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, but with that said ... IRC has serious issues, and dancing around them or pretending they're not there is not helping. I talk a bit about them here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JeromeLeclanche/posts/icC6gDToB... The reason Slack exists and can be so successful yet entirely proprietary is a symptom that IRC is not good enough and that has to be fixed. It is the manifestation of the papercuts we, IRC users, ha…

What is wrong with Mattermost? I've never actually used it, but it seems like a better OSS slack competitor than irc. If it really is just the problem of 1 project per tab, surely fixing that minor issue is easier than a whole new IRC spec?

It's the other way around: Mattermost has a ridiculously small userbase, compared to IRC. IRCv3 is compatible with IRC2.1. It's a lot easier to extend the IRC spec than it is to write competing software.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#194

Post by donatj »

I hear a lot of people talking about the problems with IRC, and I truly wish someone would enumerate them. It works great for our needs but I'm very curious the ways it isn't working for some.

We use a self hosted IRC server, along with an IRC bot written in Go for everything from automated deployments to chat logs to weather and traffic and bus schedules.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#195

Post by benwaffle »

sktrdie wrote: post #17

Main problem with IRC is that it's not "always on" and I really need this feature. Sure you can use IRCCloud or SSH/Screen into a server, but they both cost money while Slack is free.

You can use Quassel (http://quassel-irc.org/). It's like ZNC without the setup

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#196

Post by Hello71 »

orofino wrote: post #136

Allow me to shout into the void for a minute here... 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, mes…

> 1. Slack is a well-designed interface for allowing teams to communicate via chat.

subjective. I consider a bloated web interface taking several tens to hundreds of megabytes of RAM compared to a text-based interface taking less than 100 kB to be poorly designed.

> 2. Slack is easy to install is use on Mac, PC, iOS, and Android. It Just Works™.

spelled wrong, and IRC clients are harder to configure only because there are so many options for servers, whereas Slack only supports one server.

> 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.

webchat was invented for a reason

> 4. Slack has whimsy. Fun colors, messaging, emoticon, bots, etc.

IRC has had mIRC-style colors supported and even adjustable by the majority of clients for at least 10 years. I don't know what "messaging" means. If you mean "private messaging", pretty much every chat software in the world has that. AOL and ICQ have that. You can put emoticons in your text manually if you want. It was on IRC that the concept of chat bots was invented, not on Slack.

> 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.

Yes, it is about how much money a for-profit company has to spend on marketing and copy as opposed to a standards organization.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#197

Post by scythe »

KirinDave wrote: post #130

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…

Are these limitations in the protocol, or just in the network, especially freenode? If someone were to run a paid, $5-a-month to run a channel with over 20 users IRC network, would they be able to address the difficulties of freenode and EFNet before it? Would SILC fix anything?

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#198

Post by upofadown »

zanny wrote: post #191

Somewhat tangential but relevant, what the hell happened to XMPP, period? Wasn't it supposed to be our one communication account we do groupchat, video calls, IMs with persistence, and file transfers over? Why did it just up and die with nobody working on it and nobody using it? http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html exists. Its groupchat, it could probably be amended to support inline code, and its persistence mod…

Well XMPP groupchat does in fact work (as you say). So the question would be; how does it compare to Slack? ... and IRC?

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#199

Post by thaumasiotes »

Hello71 wrote: post #188
KirinDave wrote: post #130

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…

> Oh, and did you know that with modest, low volume channels (>200 source? or at least names of networks/IRCds? freenode at least has 19 channels with more than 1000 users currently, and one with just barely more than 2000. ##linux 2072 :It's official! We're now Linux.Chat! | Channel website: http://linux.chat | Pastebin: http://paste.linux.chat | Spammers or trolls? use !ops ". | For op assistance, join ##linux-ops…

Considering World of Warcraft guild channels have a configurable "message of the day", I kind of assumed all WoW chat was IRC. I'm sure they break 1000 users in a channel without problems.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#200

Post by scrollaway »

zanny wrote: post #191

Somewhat tangential but relevant, what the hell happened to XMPP, period? Wasn't it supposed to be our one communication account we do groupchat, video calls, IMs with persistence, and file transfers over? Why did it just up and die with nobody working on it and nobody using it? http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html exists. Its groupchat, it could probably be amended to support inline code, and its persistence mod…

Previous discussion on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280611

It's sad. But the only thing that can be done is work on an actual protocol that will solve these problems. It's a big burden to bear, and more often than not, building something that will bear such a burden just kills it outright (cf... xmpp.)

Post reply on HN