271–280 of 499 posts
> Problems with IRC that Slack solves Main thing that Slack solves as far as I'm concerned is a great and uniform client on every platform. Don't get me wrong, I love irc. This is where I started learning everything I know about computer. I tried many times to get various team on it and it always failed. I think it's mainly because the learning curve is too big for non-technical/busy people, and that there's no good…
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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…
> but you draw a much bleaker portrait of IRC I'm being brutally real. IRC is a brittle, aged, poorly designed protocol even by the standards of 1988 academia. You could design a more robust centralized service just by using off the shelf components today. Seriously. Use off the shelf Google Container Engine stuff along with some modest websocket work and even relative neophyte will end up with a more robust service…
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> 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 s…
Which is the horse and which is the cart? Slack is easy because it got resources to be easy. Those same resource could have invested time to make IRC just as easy.
There is no inherent reason why IRC cannot be just as simple.
The reason slack is popular is because it got pushed hard and lots of money went into making it easy and popular.
There is nothing inherent about IRC that would have prevented it to be just as easy as slack if the same resources were put for that work.
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 public FOSS project should be able to use whatever they want for bug management, issue management, support, and other things that do not affect the core project in any way if compromised or monitored.
Especially if the company behind said product even give out discounts or free usage accounts to such projects like Atlassian or github.
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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. That's a pretty narrow view of 'slightly technical'. These days, we've got generations of people who can manage their own email account setup, install web apps and mysql databases, configure zapier to connect multiple apps together withi…
Technology isn't easy. Pretending it should be causes problems.
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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)?
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> 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 s…
Some open source self-hosted alternatives to Slack: * Rocket.Chat ( https://rocket.chat/ ) * Zulip ( https://zulip.org/ ) * Mattermost ( http://www.mattermost.org/ ) * Let's Chat ( http://sdelements.github.io/lets-chat/ ) Oh, and by the way, you could have your own Rocket.Chat instance running in Sandstorm in about 30 seconds: https://sandstorm.io/apps Update. And I would love to see a modern federated chat protocol…
XMPP?
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 suggestin…
I don't use IRC anymore, I use Slack but only because it's convenient. IRC is all over the place like the majority open source projects. Slack is clearly inspired by IRC, but it's in a pretty package and works OOB. Not sure why people are shitting on Slack or IRC here.