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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

#291

Post by tptacek »

skewp wrote: post #286
tptacek wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You've been able to directly send files over DCC via IRC clients since like 1995. Interpreting and displaying those DCC'ed files or cutting longer messages into sub messages and recombining them is something that you could implement via the IRC client just as easily as it was implemented in Slack (not to say that it would be easy, it'd be a lot of work, but it likely would not be much more work than what took to make…

No. In Slack, files and images posted to channels are content associated with the channel, not a private and opaque stream of bytes tunneled over another protocol between two specific channel members. The comparison between Slack and DCC is silly.

Given the problem of sharing a diagram with a team of developers on a group message channel, I'm sure there's someone here who would say they prefer the DCC option of receiving a named file and then opening it with a file viewer, rather than simply dragging the file into the chat window and having it appear instantly to everyone on the channel. The existence of that person is not interesting to me.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#292

Post by KirinDave »

hueving wrote: post #272
KirinDave wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

No, the point was that your description was entirely inaccurate. It's not brutally real because I also use IRC extensively every day on freenode and have almost never encountered the issues you are referring to. I think I've seen one netsplit in the last 2 years.

Okay, well I am sorry your experience and mine differ. Fortunately you can continue to use your solution without regard to my criticism.

But I think if we asked your IRC network how ma you nets plots they experienced in the last 2 years the number would be >1.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#293

Post by tptacek »

rhizome wrote: post #278
spdustin wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm thinking a huge part of the difference between Slack and IRC audiences has to do with the $340MM Slack has raised. If someone gave "IRC" a quarter of a billion dollars, the differences might not be so obvious.

If you gave "IRC" a quarter of a billion dollars, we'd have the world's most complex ncurses UI, and a security ACL system whose complexity would rival X509. And normal people would still use Slack, because Slack was able to make simple design decisions that benefit the overwhelming majority of users but piss off Unix nerds like us.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#294

Post by tedunangst »

tptacek wrote: post #256
bitL wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

icb4lyfe

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#295

Post by chipsy »

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...

IRC population has also become harder to track because more people now set up cottage networks that have one server and only host a few channels. There was an article a few years ago discussing this exodus from big networks which I'm having trouble bringing up now.

The worst that can happen to IRC is something like Usenet's death - growing too popular to scale. But scaling isn't of primary importance because a network hosting 100,000 channels is only mildly more convenient than 100 networks hosting 1,000 channels each. Nobody wants a chat stream that looks like a popular Twitch channel, because there is no longer any signal when that happens, so big channels are outliers. (And Twitch chat is IRC-based itself - demonstrating how much this technology is a commodity.)

IRC isn't going to stagnate completely until people decide to give up on text-based chat. The main thing it has trouble with is new client features like inline images.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#296

Post by SamReidHughes »

tptacek wrote: post #269
kbuck wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, IRC is generally UTF-8 with some Windows-1252 mixed in.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#297

Post by heavenlyhash »

scrollaway wrote: post #277
ZenoArrow wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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)?

I am following it from afar. I don't see how it'll gain traction, ever, though. The marketing problem is one devs don't like to solve, but it has to be solved.

I got my mother to use Matrix.

She's a smart cookie, granted.

But she's not a developer. I couldn't reasonably get her to use IRC.

I couldn't get her to use XMPP.

I couldn't get her to use Facebook chat. (Moral reasons, there, mostly.)

She could get started using Matrix in a single sitting. We're still using it to communicate.

Anecdata? Absolutely. With a dash of emotional appeal, even -- the worst kind of anecdata! Still: true. So, while Matrix may not have a million dollar marketing budget in play... there's reasonable hope that the ease-of-use requirement for mass adoption is well on its way.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#298

Post by jzd »

mynegation wrote: post #32

There is a chance to repeat git success story. Remember what happened? 1. Everyone uses cvs or svn. 2. Bitkeeper comes along with a good DVCS, gets adopted by Linux. 3. Linus rants about closedness of BK, reimplements it as git. 4. Git takes life on its own gets wildly popular and makes way for many awesome things such as github and gitlab. Replace svn by irc and bitkeeper with slack. Figure out the rest.

Rocket Chat. Already use it at my company.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#299

Post by jarek »

tptacek wrote: post #257
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

The ICB people thought the same thing about IRC.

The HTTP people thought the same thing about AOL.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#300

Post by jzd »

davexunit wrote: post #232

Completely agree! I see free software projects depend on proprietary tools all the time and it is very frustrating. I often see projects using JIRA or asking companies like JetBrains for gratis licenses to proprietary development tools, and now I'm seeing Slack more frequently. I will not participate in your free software project if you depend on SaaSS or proprietary software to get work done. The company I work for…

We must reject Slack because it isn't a tool for the people, but a tool for profit.

Absolutely this. Never forget this.

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