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Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

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Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#211

Post by spdustin »

mbillie1 wrote: post #207
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…

> 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. I'd just like to point out that this argument ("if were so great, everyone would already use/do ") is just a slightly different form of the ancient appeal to popularity argument and is entirely fallacious.

Respectfully, I disagree. In many cases, things are popular because they are better/easier for a given audience. I'm a smart guy, have managed (and continue to manage) many, many UNIX-based services, and have run several IRC daemons in my life.

I still use Slack for internal use, and for our students.

What makes Slack (and its ilk, though the title of the post makes a bias against Slack clear) so great is that it's simple, easy, full-featured and has a low barrier to entry to the non-HN crowd that is being asked, in many cases, to use it.

I can promise you, out of experience and out of just plain statistics, that Slack and IRC have different audiences, and those audiences will not likely prefer the other.

Also, I'd guess that IRC is actually the more popular choice. But the majority of the IRC using audience is too busy getting work done in IRC to comment on an HN post.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#212

Post by ocfx »

mbillie1 wrote: post #207
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…

> 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. I'd just like to point out that this argument ("if were so great, everyone would already use/do ") is just a slightly different form of the ancient appeal to popularity argument and is entirely fallacious.

Yep! Unfortunately most debates or discussion are won with successive appeals to the people. People don't really seem to be that interested in informal logic as it applies to whatever discussion they are having. I think because it invalidates what they say in a way that isn't immediately intuitive so it feels fuzzier and easier to dismiss.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#213

Post by ywecur »

scrollaway wrote: post #41
emergentcypher wrote: post #26

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.

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…

So use Rocket.chat or Mattermost

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#215

Post by davexunit »

parasubvert wrote: post #12

This seems to be similar to the argument of "don't use Github or Bitbucket, use your own hosted Gitlab". Some of the complaints are a bit petty (really, an extra browser tab per project is a burden?) IRC is better for occasional participants that wish to remain anonymous and/or use less screen real estate, but Slack is generally a better experience for regulars and way less hassle than hosting your own server/bots. Y…

>really, an extra browser tab per project is a burden?

Spoken like someone who has never been a serious IRC user.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#216

Post by jarek »

morgante wrote: post #208
ve55 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the better reasons for opting for open-source alternatives to new technologies. If you have a single person that is even slightly technical, it should be trivial to set up your own IRC server, and then you get complete control over all of your own information. Even with that, you still can choose from a multitude of servers, services, clients, bots, client scripts, bouncers, and so on. Anything common…

> If you have a single person that is even slightly technical, it should be trivial to set up your own IRC server, and then you get complete control over all of your own information. I'm "slightly" technical and I have absolutely no interest in setting up an IRC server for my project or company. That's time better spent on developing our offerings. While I have no doubt I could set up a server, I also have no doubt t…

Sure, but ve55 said "trivial", not "interesting" or "worth the time." It just means that you value your data and its ownership a certain way and your time a certain way. Also note that a for-profit company will have that balance in a different spot than a FOSS project.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#217

Post by ftwynn »

mbillie1 wrote: post #207
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…

> 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. I'd just like to point out that this argument ("if were so great, everyone would already use/do ") is just a slightly different form of the ancient appeal to popularity argument and is entirely fallacious.

That the reasoning is fallacious doesn't make the conclusion incorrect. I could argue that 1+1=2 because when I looked directly into the sun today both my eyes closed. The reasoning is wrong, but the conclusion is true.

Similarly here, you could argue that the popularity argument is stronger because the tools are relatively easy to switch between and people are constantly re-evaluating this choice as new projects are created. Lock in and other switching costs bolster the concern of relying on popularity, but those don't come into play very strongly here.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#218

Post by nerdwaller »

> requires users to have a different tab open for each project they want to be involved in

This isn't true, down the left side bar you can select other teams if you've signed into more than one.

I'm not suggesting we should only use slack, but at least they do make it fairly easy to navigate.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#219

Post by vjeux »

mbrock wrote: post #206
vjeux wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For context, we've always promoted IRC for real time communication on React. I encouraged people to setup other mediums for communication and many people attempted but only one took off: Reactiflux on Slack. The official way is still IRC on the website but most people are using Reactiflux which is pretty incredible. Now, we got the bad news a month ago that we've been kicked off of Slack :( So, I started looking at a…

Why'd you get kicked from Slack?

We received the following email from someone at Slack:

"I’m writing to inform you that we've disabled the ability to add more users to the Reactiflux Slack team. We're happy that you've found Slack to be a great platform for your community but from both an administrative and performance perspective this is proving to be unsustainable.

Although we do simple chat and file-sharing very well, Slack simply isn’t designed for communities of thousands of users to chat. Slack's ideally designed for teams of coworkers who collaborate closely and frequently to get work done. That said, looking into ways to better support communities like yours in the future is something that has been suggested many times! The idea is under consideration, and if changes are implemented to make this easier in the future, we'll be sure to get the word out.

I’m not sure how you’re sending out your invites, because if you’re using the web interface it should tell you that your maximum user limit was reached. If you’re using the undocumented API, we’re returning a user_limit_reached error that you'll run into soon.

If you do want to continue to use Slack to manage this community, I'd recommend you spin up multiple smaller teams and cap each one around no more than 1,000 users. Once one team fills up, stop inviting people to that team and start a new one for the next group of people who want to join your community. That's the best way to ensure that your teams remain manageable and that the service stays nice and snappy for you.

Thanks so much for your understanding. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to drop us a line!"

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#220

Post by briandear »

ionforce wrote: post #84
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a really important point. What Slack solves -- speaking in the general case, not specifically for FOSS projects -- is that it's an essentially out-of-the-box solution. Not just for non-technical users, although that's very important, but for all users. Both the linked article and the various suggestions in comments give all sorts of IRC-based alternatives to what Slack does, but they're all things tha…

You're absolutely right. But it's sad that comments like this even need to be made. Like people constantly forget that usability is a thing and not everyone has infinite free time to burn on setting things up.

..especially for open source. Increasing the time barrier/complexity just to chat is a big turn off. I already use Slack for work, so adding FOSS projects would be easy. But if I have to fiddle with chat, that's time I could be coding or doing something more productive.

This whole discussion is similar to that Ogg vs MP3 file nonsense on Wikipedia; the victory of philosophical purity over practicality and usability. I still can't just click a Wikipedia sound file on my iPhone and have it just work. Victory for ideological purity big fail for the 98% of the world that doesn't give a s--t about file formats or Jimmy Wales's religion.

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