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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

#261

Post by eddiezane »

Slack is starting to be used as the communication platform at events now as well. Most of the hackathons and conferences I've attended recently have used it and added all of the attendees.

It's worked really nicely for communicating announcements and updates with the added benefit of allowing attendees to socialize before, at, and after the event. It's also really changed how things like mentorship are done [0].

The problem I've had is the lack of any form of SSO. With all the events, FOSS projects, and actual organizations I'm up to 19 Slack accounts. Having to signup and create a new account almost every weekend is getting crazy.

[0]: https://medium.com/mhacks-hackathon/hackathon-mentorship-can...

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#262

Post by okasaki »

enjo wrote: post #120
okasaki wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people talk like this is some impossible feat for IRC? 1. Have a bot that's in the channel from the start 2. cd into the bot's log directory and type python -m SimpleHTTPServer 3. put the url into the channel topic How do some developers fail to rise up to this level of problem solving? I am amazed.

What if I didn't have the foresight to put that bot into the channel in the first place? Or what happens when the bot goes down? So now I really need to build some alerting into it so that someone can restart the thing when it dies, or the server is upgraded, or it's moved.. because I'm losing valuable history along the way. Or I can just use Slack. The snark about developer skill is an interesting one, as you failed…

Seems you've only explored failures for the IRC option.

What happens when Slack closes? Or they change their payment plan? Or they decide that they don't like your project? Or they're acquired by Microsoft and stop supporting your OS? What if a rogue Slack employee spies on your chat and steals your secrets?

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#263

Post by kbuck »

tptacek wrote: post #243
sdegutis wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC is just a well-established and battle-tested server/client protocol. I'm eager for the day when a competing open source server/client protocol emerges and takes over. I imagine all it would take is a really good reference implementation server and client that everyone can just start using, right?

It's a well-established shitty protocol, largely designed in the early 1990s as the simplest thing that could possibly work for the workloads we had in the early 1990s. It's terribly limited (7 bit, small message sizes, virtually no useful metadata) and in the 98% use case, its "distributed" characteristics cause more problems than they solve. No competent person setting out to design a group communications protocol…

Mostly correct, but one nit to pick: IRC is not 7-bit; you can actually transmit unicode messages on every IRC network I've ever seen. It's also not usually unicode-aware, though, so if you send a message too long, it might get truncated halfway through a codepoint. Many IRC networks prohibit non-ASCII channel names and nicknames to prevent impersonation (e.g. with zero-width spaces).

The rest of what you've said is pretty much true.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#264

Post by KirinDave »

kbuck wrote: post #254
KirinDave wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I do not doubt you.

But that's not what we were told. Another admin from espernet basically had us kill the project because they said the way Eirc was using the system constituted a "significant load" and "would not scale well". We were growing really fast and proxying maybe 3-10 users per bot connection on average. I think your team came to us with the problem right as we were really exploding with users.

We basically massively scaled back that deployment of a really cool and interesting feature. Because we didn't want to be an undue burden on our gracious hosts. Now you tell me that this was just some admin giving us an exaggeration?

That's a very frustrating detail to learn. Probably not your fault, but thanks for the clarification I guess.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#266

Post by ZenoArrow »

scrollaway wrote: post #200
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.)

> "But the only thing that can be done is work on an actual protocol that will solve these problems."

What about the Matrix protocol (referenced in other comments made in this discussion)?

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#267

Post by federico3 »

manigandham wrote: post #260
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?

> 99% of the stuff you use everyday is closed-source and proprietary

This is Hacker News; I expect the average to be around 20%

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#268

Post by rrix »

heavenlyhash wrote: post #170

Come to the Matrix! [1] - Open! Free on both the beer|culture axis! - Modern! (There's actually control structures in the protocol. Imagine: a chat protocol that's actually ascii safe! (Yes, yes, unicode too: the joke is, IRC isn't even ascii safe .)) - Many platforms! (The matrix.org site has a full client list; I'm personally using it via a linux desktop client (that also works on windows and mac), the web, my ipad…

+1

matrix solves a lot of problems that IRC has and even lets you solve those problems on IRC through the MatrixIRC bridge :)

I've been using it as a replacement for my IRC bouncer for a while, barring a bug that prevents support of SSL-only rooms, and it's been wonderful. Great web client on vector.im, pretty decent mobile clients given they are "reference implementations", support for VoIP voice and video chat, coming support for e2e encryption (the DAG just stores encrypted blobs now)

I've long felt that a big piece of my love of IRC was the spontaneous intersections of my communities. I got involved in FOSS and open source because one time a person mentioned there was a LUG chat for the city I was in; that led me in to a long chain of events that ended with me getting involved in the Fedora Project and other FOSS communities. Slack is creating a world where that is simply not possible. One of the big things that this discussion misses is that tribal-intersections that IRC allows opens up a huge door for abuse. Slack "solves" that by siloing you away from the world, but that has always been a lazy and error prone solution.

I feel like Matrix is in a position to move the needle on that. It's got a huge distributed DAG specifically designed for human-metadata like chat and presence and, well, why not put Karma or Reputation on that DAG as well? People have talked of dogecoin and similar as a Whuffie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie) and in my mind Matrix is an interesting platform to build something like that on. I could create a room that requires a certain reputation level to post in, and you'd have to gain reputation in other communities to be allowed to post in to mine. When you realize that Matrix.org 1:1 chats are just "rooms with only two people in them" that becomes a really nice way to solve the spam/abuse issue. Prove to my friends in the public chat that you aren't a shitbag and you can talk to me.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#269

Post by tptacek »

kbuck wrote: post #263
tptacek wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a well-established shitty protocol, largely designed in the early 1990s as the simplest thing that could possibly work for the workloads we had in the early 1990s. It's terribly limited (7 bit, small message sizes, virtually no useful metadata) and in the 98% use case, its "distributed" characteristics cause more problems than they solve. No competent person setting out to design a group communications protocol…

Mostly correct, but one nit to pick: IRC is not 7-bit; you can actually transmit unicode messages on every IRC network I've ever seen. It's also not usually unicode-aware, though, so if you send a message too long, it might get truncated halfway through a codepoint. Many IRC networks prohibit non-ASCII channel names and nicknames to prevent impersonation (e.g. with zero-width spaces). The rest of what you've said is…

IRC messages have CRLF message delimiters (and ASCII space field delimiters) and no quoting mechanism in the protocol. They're delivered over a long-lived synchronized TCP stream. Does it just happen that no 8-bit sequence people normally want to send on IRC ever manages to collide with 0D:0Ah?

I haven't seen unicode messages on IRC channels, but I don't spend much time on IRC anymore, and so this is interesting new information for me --- but there's more to being 8-bit clean than simply supporting internationalized character sets.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#270

Post by harryh »

davexunit wrote: post #215
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.

"someone who has never been a serious IRC user" ~= "almost everyone"
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