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Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

drewdevault.com

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Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#251

Post by tptacek »

If you don't want to use Slack for open source projects because it's closed-source, fine. That's a reasonable argument.

If you don't want to use Slack for open source projects because Slack is in fact pretty bad at those workloads, fine. I agree! I think Slack does a pretty bad job at any group application where most of the people communicating don't already know each other.

Where you go off the rails is in suggesting that IRC is competitive with Slack. IRC is awful. It's a medium dominated by 7-bit clients with tiny message limits that provides virtually no useful metadata and no works-by-default history or search --- both things that virtually every open source IRC support channel b a d l y needs.

IRC does exactly one thing better than Slack: it's easier to join a new IRC channel than it is to join a new Slack project. The rest of IRC's "features" are red herrings, many of them more harmful than helpful.

Surely by now someone has built a Slack-like, perhaps with decent IRC support, that big open source projects can champion as a Slack- and IRC alternative.

It will be much easier to keep open source projects from trying to fit their square pegs into Slack's round aperture when people give up on promoting IRC.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#252

Post by tptacek »

donatj wrote: post #187
astazangasta wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Unless you run a private IRC server IRC has a long, tortured history of design-based security difficulties. So run a private IRC server? This is a weird caveat, like complaining that angelfire is an insufficient web platform and you have to run your own http server to do well. There are a billion IRC clients, libraries, and bots out there. There are IRC servers in most distros. There are JS servers in NPM. Why not u…

My company runs our own private IRC server on an EC2 instance and once it was set up I don't believe we've needed to touch it since.

Your company puts private information on a server that has a 6667/tcp sitting out on the Internet?

I'm guessing it does not, and setting this server up was considerably more irritating than just spawning off another t1.micro and apt installing IRC onto it.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#253

Post by jarek »

KirinDave wrote: post #244
jarek wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, for one, think that reinventing the wheel is a totally great idea and that we should have more npms and less apts

I, for one, think that the march of technological experimentation and progress should stop unless we can convince specifically jarek of the value of any given project, as jarek has demonstrated that they want to become the arbiters of all value judgments.

Yes. My first verdict: outlawing files and having VC land come up with a replacement product with better UX. Then HTTP.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#254

Post by kbuck »

KirinDave wrote: post #240
Hello71 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

We nearly broke EsperNet with about 500 users which were proxies into Minecraft servers. We used a Minecraft mod called EiraIRC. The constant connection and traffic from these users required a fair amount of interaction and management between us and the staff. And Espernet is not a small network by IRC standards. The problem is that all traffic has to be carried to all nodes brokering connections for a channel. When…

EsperNet server administrator here. You did not 'nearly break EsperNet' with EiraIRC usage. Our capacity vastly exceeds our load (we could likely run the entire network from a single one of our servers). However, the time our administrative team has to spend differentiating abusive bots from non-abusive ones is finite, which is why we place so many restrictions upon bots.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#255

Post by akx »

virmundi wrote: post #112
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…

As someone with no ops experience, can't most of this automation be done with Puppet or Chef? If so, is there anyone with public github share of those files?

As far as I know, most of this complexity surrounds setting up the _client_ software, not the server bits (though that, considering availability and so on, is its own bucket of worms) -- you just don't get Any Random User to install Puppet or Chef and pull in a cookbook or recipe or I don't know what they're called and ... well, I guess you get the point.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#256

Post by tptacek »

bitL wrote: post #246
simias wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC is used by many projects small and big and I've used it in a few companies as well, it's not like it's an absurd concept. I don't know if Slack is better or worse (I've never used it, I thought the title was talking about Slackware linux which seemed odd) but you draw a much bleaker portrait of IRC than what I experience day to day using it extensively. Now if you want to talk about mailing lists I might side wit…

Slack is basically IRC with "subjectively nicer" design and helpful integrations, e.g. your builds, deployment, compilation progress can show up on separate channels, you can see if somebody mentioned you on twitter etc. You get the idea. Principally it's just extended IRC, maybe they even use slightly modified IRC protocol underneath for anything chat-wise.

Slack's benefits over IRC are largely not subjective:

* The ability to directly send files and images to channels is an objective benefit Slack has over IRC, which has even less ability to do that than MIME email (at least MIME lets you post the base64'd file contents of your image, rather than just a clickable link).

* The ability to send long messages or whole source files is an objective benefit Slack has over IRC.

* The ability to, by default and without running a secondary service that can crash or lose connectivity, log and search channels is an objective Benefit Slack has over IRC, which can support that feature only by using bots, and only by tunneling results through privmsgs or forcing users to leave the IRC protocol itself and visit ancillary web sites.

* The ability to edit and delete messages is an objective benefit Slack has over IRC.

There's probably a bunch more. Don't get me wrong: I don't think Slack is amazing; it's good for what it is, but in 2015 it's pretty unremarkable. The issue is that IRC is so. bad.

There are probably still people making fun of poseurs and hipsters who use IRC instead of ICB. The OpenBSD team used to be like that.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#257

Post by tptacek »

jarek wrote: post #209
tormeh wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I like the Emacs shortcuts! And "buffer" is a sensible way to describe an opened file. It has worked for decades and will continue to work for decades more! Get off my lawn, whippersnappers!

I, for one, think that reinventing the wheel is a totally great idea and that we should have more npms and less apts

The ICB people thought the same thing about IRC.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#258

Post by JupiterMoon »

notwedtm wrote: post #249
Hello71 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ther…

This whole response reads like it was written in the 90's. Most people don't care if something takes up 10's of MB's of RAM when new PC's are shipping with 16-32GB standard. Your comparison of what amounts to ASCII art versus Slack's rich-media embedding reads like it is straight out of a Fortran developer's "I'm still relevant" handbook. You even offer up AOL and ICQ as counter examples! If we're going there, I gues…

Fortran is still relevant. In it's field.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#260

Post by manigandham »

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.

What, exactly, is going to go wrong with this?

I really don't get this, 99% of the stuff you use everyday is closed-source and proprietary. Most often the tradeoff in something bad happening (which has yet to be with Slack) versus having a functional and productive system is more than worth it.

Or do you also build your own computer from raw silicon and communicate with pirated radio signals?

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