Slack has some major design flaws. It's not developer-friendly either. I really don't get why hackers are not pushing for Gitter! It has SSO, it's developer-friendly, it's cheaper, it's embeddable, etc.
Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives
151–160 of 176 posts
Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any reason not to have openid or persona signup? Its just annoying nowadays to encounter a site where it still wants only plain old username / password.
Matrix as a protocol supports arbitrary login mechanisms; Vector + Synapse can hook into CAS, SAML2, LDAP and OAuth flows already. Patches more than welcome to hook it into OpenID or Persona :)
Persona support would be great!
Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives
#153Slack has some major design flaws. It's not developer-friendly either. I really don't get why hackers are not pushing for Gitter! It has SSO, it's developer-friendly, it's cheaper, it's embeddable, etc.
From one closed source system to the next.
Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives
#154Slack has some major design flaws. It's not developer-friendly either. I really don't get why hackers are not pushing for Gitter! It has SSO, it's developer-friendly, it's cheaper, it's embeddable, etc.
From one closed source system to the next.
True, it's just that Gitter is so much better for development. Yet, developers are still pushing Slack.
Anyway, wasn't Gitter open-source in the beginning though [0]?
Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives
#155I wish that someone would build an easy-to-use layer on top of an open protocol like IRC or XMPP. The tool could manage setup, configuration, archiving, and notifications. Instead of building a walled garden that is merely accessible via an open protocol, it would be more interesting to build a thin layer on top of an XMPP server that could even be removed or replaced later, if desired.
I got pointed to irccloud.com the last time I asked about that.
I wish more people _would_ talk about IRCCloud in these threads. They don't have many people working on their product, but they give me hope that someone actually can modernize IRC. Their newly redesigned web UI is now snappier than Slack (on Chrome at least), they support emoji, cmd+k, and image/video/pastebin/gist/tweet/etc embedding. Only real downside is that they're currently developing the ability to search your logs. I know some people using it as a bouncer with their own client, but then taking advantage of mobile clients and push notifications.
Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives
#156Earlier 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…
Just in case you don't know, several modern IRC clients will automatically fetch links posted in the channel and, if they are images (or even things like YouTube videos), display them inline. I don't know if any of them support automatically converting pasted images to links, though; it sounds sinple enough that I wouldn't be surprised if at least one did.
Of course, what you mentioned is only one of many things that Just Work in Slack and are at best a pain on IRC, but still.
Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives
#157Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slack already has the ability to do the opposite: https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connec... There's some startups like https://grove.io/ that do it. I think the biggest problem is the people who use IRC aren't the type of people to pay. Additionally, walled gardens are pretty nice when it comes to making a cohesive experience. As soon as you build on top of something else, you're beholden to its…
Isn't there a more fundamental issue that IRC does not map to Slack? Mentioned over and over, but Slack backlog is crazy useful, and I don't think IRC the protocol has any mapping for that. There's also things like permission sets that don't map 1:1 (but you can find workarounds, of course) There's also the whole way notifications work... basically Slack and IRC are only the same (or even similar) on an extremely sup…
IRC with a bouncer maps to it
Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty sure I heard somewhere that Slack uses a modified IRC bouncer (e.g., ZNC[0]) to implement accounts. Could be wrong about that, but if that is in fact the case, this whole Slack vs. IRC debate would take on a whole new level of absurdity. [0]: http://wiki.znc.in/ZNC
Slack has never been about the underlying tech (which may well be IRC), it's all about the polish. A lot of comments I see here about Slack remind me of the infamous "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 ).
> Slack has never been about the underlying tech (which may well be IRC)
Yes, and that's the gripe with Slack - because it should be IRC underneath, but it isn't. Instead of using an open, standard protocol they fragmented the communications space even further.
But yeah, that's how SV rolls these days. Locking people in.
Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives
#160Also Potato, which me and a few friends have been developing for our own use for a while. It will be released as open source soon.
I will make a separate post once the source is released, but for now anyone that is interested can take a look at a small demo system I set up here: http://potato.dhsdevelopments.com/
The server is written in Common Lisp, client in Clojurescript. Storage backend uses CouchDB, messaging using RabbitMQ and the search uses Solr. More technical details here: http://blog.potato.network/