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Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

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Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#101

Post by lfowles »

balls187 wrote: post #77
pnathan wrote: post #3

Can someone explain the attraction that nerds have for Slack/Hipchat over a well-tended IRC server?

> Can someone explain the attraction that nerds have for Slack/Hipchat over a well-tended IRC server? 1. Nerds (like me) have to talk to non-nerds. 2. Nerds (unlike me, but not unlike my wife) aren't interested in complex solutions to simple problems. And frankly, who is the "tender" of the "well-tended" IRC server? I don't want to maintain it. My wife and I used slack as the primary means with which we communicate f…

Interesting, because my wife (non-tech, but still nerdy EE) and I communicate a lot via IRC! I've never used Slack, but my assumption is that it's ephemeral messaging at the core. Could you expand on how you archive recipes?

I should probably expand that IRC for us is pretty stateful, since we both run our own irssi instances in screen on a VPS.

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#102

Post by Albright »

tptacek wrote: post #91
Albright wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. How's this: If the UI of a desktop application does not match the standard appearance and interface of the rest of the operating system, a bad UX is almost a certainty, in my experience.

If I want to share a diagram with Patrick on our internal Slack --- which we set up in under 10 minutes --- I select the diagram on my desktop and drag it into the window for the Slack channel. Everyone on that channel sees the diagram immediately . I do not give a shit what Slack's buttons look like. I can't do that with IRC. Even if we're all standardized on a modern OSX IRC client, we're still going to end up "sha…

Again, you can use HipChat and get something closer to the best of both worlds; drag-and-drop file sharing with a standard (well… more standard-ish) OS X interface. It's great for you that look-and-feel isn't so important to you, but it is to a lot of people, and that includes myself.

At any rate, on Slack, I once drag-and-dropped a text file with the output of a shell script that a colleague wanted to see. He started telling me how it was strange that the output seemed to cut off right in the middle of a line. lol, just kidding, Slack was just cutting it off like that, since Slack apparently can't show more than the first few K of a text file for some reason SO WHY IS IT SHOWING IT AT ALL ARGH

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#103

Post by jahewson »

Albright wrote: post #72
brenschluss wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of your comments about Slack's UX are actually about UX; they're about the UI.

Fair enough. How's this: If the UI of a desktop application does not match the standard appearance and interface of the rest of the operating system, a bad UX is almost a certainty, in my experience.

I disagree. Microsoft Office hasn't looked like the rest of Windows for years. iTunes looks unlike any other OS X app. Photoshop has never used native UI. Non-native UI can be done very well as long as it's not entirely foreign, or an uncanny emulation of almost-native.

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#104

Post by lfowles »

kefka wrote: post #67
Killswitch wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I had that mentality once. "Why should I use 3rd party stuff when I am a developer and can do it all myself?!?!" Then I realized I was wasting time working on stuff that don't matter, instead of working on stuff that mattered. If that's your thing, that's your thing and go do it. But it's not a lot of peoples, and that's why Slack is so popular.

> "Why should I use 3rd party stuff when I am a developer and can do it all myself?!?!" But that's not what I'm doing. Company A does really good semantic analysis. Company B does chat, say Slack. Company C file storage. Company D does search. Now, I'm spinning up or using a current server. In this case, lets do IRC to Company Chat, B (bidi bridge). I connect to Company B with my user, and a user on IRC. Logging is t…

> And, I just created a new product.

That's exactly the point. Is this what your day job is paying you to do?

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#105

Post by hatsix »

Albright wrote: post #72
brenschluss wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of your comments about Slack's UX are actually about UX; they're about the UI.

Fair enough. How's this: If the UI of a desktop application does not match the standard appearance and interface of the rest of the operating system, a bad UX is almost a certainty, in my experience.

How about this: A very strongly worded statement with a huge assumption stating almost certainty, with a small caveat of 'in my experience' allowing me to refute anyone who might spend time listing out all of the examples of how this is wrong.

In MY experience, it is Certainly good UX to not have to learn multiple ways of doing things, one for the in-browser experience, and one for the desktop experience.

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#106

Post by squidlogic »

hellbanner wrote: post #7

I'm seeing "No e2e encrypted DMs" as one of the cons for most of these.. anyone have a solution?

Maybe give balboa.io a try, it's the closest I can think of. Not just DMs but also file storage and transfer. Kind of similar UI to slack.

Also, peerio.com, but they don't have a 'channels-like' interface, so maybe not what you're looking for.

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#107

Post by Albright »

jahewson wrote: post #103
Albright wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. How's this: If the UI of a desktop application does not match the standard appearance and interface of the rest of the operating system, a bad UX is almost a certainty, in my experience.

I disagree. Microsoft Office hasn't looked like the rest of Windows for years. iTunes looks unlike any other OS X app. Photoshop has never used native UI. Non-native UI can be done very well as long as it's not entirely foreign, or an uncanny emulation of almost-native.

How odd that you used three applications with widely despised UIs as your examples.

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#108

Post by squidlogic »

zokier wrote: post #21
hellbanner wrote: post #7

I'm seeing "No e2e encrypted DMs" as one of the cons for most of these.. anyone have a solution?

For the usecase I see these to be useful, I don't see lack of e2e such a huge concern. I would assume that in most cases the server would be more or less trusted in the context they are used in, so TLS style client-server security would be adequate. In other words, if I really wanted to have discussion secret enough to warrant e2e I probably wouldn't be using company/project chat for that no matter what sort of promi…

For less important things, I agree, run of the mill TLS is enough. But for things that are critical to the business, trade secrets, strategy, SWOT analysis of a recent breach, etc, I think every company should have an e2ee chat/file sharing app in their toolkit.

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#109

Post by allannienhuis »

lfowles wrote: post #101
balls187 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can someone explain the attraction that nerds have for Slack/Hipchat over a well-tended IRC server? 1. Nerds (like me) have to talk to non-nerds. 2. Nerds (unlike me, but not unlike my wife) aren't interested in complex solutions to simple problems. And frankly, who is the "tender" of the "well-tended" IRC server? I don't want to maintain it. My wife and I used slack as the primary means with which we communicate f…

Interesting, because my wife (non-tech, but still nerdy EE) and I communicate a lot via IRC! I've never used Slack, but my assumption is that it's ephemeral messaging at the core. Could you expand on how you archive recipes? I should probably expand that IRC for us is pretty stateful, since we both run our own irssi instances in screen on a VPS.

Slack's design is exactly the opposite of ephemeral. Everything you post, including documents, is indexed and searchable.

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#110

Post by arca_vorago »

Not a single one with end to end encrypted DM's...

I use mumble for voice (encrypted to server, server is weakpoint), irc for chat on open networks (do it from a VPS, and use screen/tmux with irssi/emacs-erc for persistence), and am using bitmessage more and more. Haven't tried tor chat yet.

Tried Slack, and even for business purposes, adoption was horrible and it ended up being a wasteland. Honestly, I think this statement from the Slack twitter sums it up: "The idea is to have a public-facing channel that a user can participate in without being a team member!"

To me, webchat plugins for IRC accomplish this just fine, and to me, is more likely to get a user directly connected with a dev/engineer.

Maybe I'm just a leftover of the 90's though... I mean usenet is disappearing so fast, even though I still love it... but as a FOSS proponent, I will use a GPL product over proprietary even if it's harder, unless absolutely necessary.

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