Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects • Hacker News Board

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#491

Post by Arathorn » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 9:37 PM UTC

e12e wrote: post #474

tabbott wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth mentioning that Zulip ( https://zulip.org/ ) is a new open source option that has basically all the features IRC/Slack does. So using open source tools for open source development doesn't have to mean dealing with IRC's limitations. (I'm one of the Zulip maintainers; happy to answer any questions about it).

> basically all the features IRC/Slack does. First, let me say that I'm really happy zulip was opened up, and grateful for you and your team to support it. But does Zulip support server federation? Obviously slack doesn't allow self-host, so if slack is the alternative, that doesn't really make much of a difference. But that is one feature that http://matrix.org/ does support.

Just to say - we would love to work with Zulip to federate it into Matrix :)

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#492

Post by josegonzalez » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 10:12 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #251

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…

IIRC, Etsy has an internal chat client for IRC called F-Train that looks to be more or less a clone of the Slack UI. They haven't released it Because Of Reasons™.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#493

Post by riking » Tue, Nov 03, 2015, 2:20 AM UTC

pyre wrote: post #410

nodamage wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, a lot of people (generally die-hard nerd types) genuinely believe that marketing was the sole reason for the iPhone's meteoric rise in 2007. They don't place any importance on user experience and therefore can't tell the difference between the iPhone and the early-gen smartphone predecessors (Palm/Nokia/etc). These are the same people that are now confused as to why Slack has risen in popularity despite the ex…

To be fair, (as a Slack user) I'm not sure off-hand what Slack has that couldn't have been done on top of IRC. Almost everything could have been done with an IRC Server + Backend Services + Fancy Client model.

Problem: "Backend services" - how many of the Slack integrations don't have public APIs and Slack was only able to do it by being a single company? Good luck convincing people to set up the API keys for all of those services.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#494

Post by michel-slm » Tue, Nov 03, 2015, 7:43 AM UTC

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…

Since we're talking about FLOSS here, why HipChat? Might as well go with Zulip which Dropbox just open-sourced.

https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2015/09/open-sourcing-zulip-a...

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#495

Post by tabbott » Tue, Nov 03, 2015, 3:54 PM UTC

Arathorn wrote: post #491

e12e wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> basically all the features IRC/Slack does. First, let me say that I'm really happy zulip was opened up, and grateful for you and your team to support it. But does Zulip support server federation? Obviously slack doesn't allow self-host, so if slack is the alternative, that doesn't really make much of a difference. But that is one feature that http://matrix.org/ does support.

Just to say - we would love to work with Zulip to federate it into Matrix :)

Ping me over email (tabbott@mit.edu) and we can discuss; I'd definitely like to add a federation story. Haven't looked at Matrix's technical approach before...

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#496

Post by pyre » Wed, Nov 04, 2015, 12:53 AM UTC

riking wrote: post #493

pyre wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, (as a Slack user) I'm not sure off-hand what Slack has that couldn't have been done on top of IRC. Almost everything could have been done with an IRC Server + Backend Services + Fancy Client model.

Problem: "Backend services" - how many of the Slack integrations don't have public APIs and Slack was only able to do it by being a single company? Good luck convincing people to set up the API keys for all of those services.

Why can't Slack run irc servers on their own equipment? The "integrations" would just be IRC bots running on private Slack servers, no?

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#497

Post by andreyf » Wed, Nov 04, 2015, 11:18 AM UTC

azernik wrote: post #172

andreyf wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you sound like an elitist prick, but rather the kind of person that enjoys tinkering with technology for fun. Perhaps unfortunately, this view is no longer representative of most people working in technology, and definitely not all of the users of Slack.

We're interested in tinkering with a lot of technology. We're not interested in tinkering with boring (admittedly a very subjective judgment) technology like a chat server.

Good call!

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#498

Post by mattisdada » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 12:46 PM UTC

oceanstone wrote: post #288

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.

> 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. Well said, I chuckled. Let me just add something... If you want a paper trail of anything, use an email you own . I have a friend who was locked out of a startup's Slack right before he was due to be paid f…

Uh, in both cases "not the user", your friend using any other system unless he decided to back it up would have been locked out anyway unless he was using a localised system like POP3... Most systems allow admins to block/prevent data exports one way or another. He could have copied and pasted the slack history if he wanted a copy as easily as he could have backed up gmail / irc / etc....

I think your argument is somewhat null....

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#499

Post by mkesper » Thu, Nov 05, 2015, 2:47 PM UTC

ash wrote: post #357

zeckalpha wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Update. And I would love to see a modern federated chat protocol to take off. Something like http://matrix.org/ . XMPP?

Unfortunately XMPP didn't take off. Notice how it's nowhere near as ubiquitous as email and web standards. Also notice how nearly all modern chat services don't support XMPP. I'd argue there are technical reasons for this situation. Try searching for "XMPP" in this thread for details.

These services don't want federation. At all.

XMPP is an awful soup of incompatible servers and clients, though.