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Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

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Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#161

Post by TeMPOraL »

askafriend wrote: post #5
pnathan wrote: post #3

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

As patio11 puts it: UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX See more: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660931499680657409 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660931665275916288 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660931949645533184 https://twitter.com/patio11/statu…

True. But that's my personal problem with Slack, and I guess that of many others too - Slack could be just as awesome as it is if it used IRC on the backend. Instead, it just fragments the already shredded realtime communications infrastructure. For me, this smells of a typical SV startup that tries to "disrupt" something by locking people in and then extracting value out of them before eventually getting acquihired and hanging them out to dry. As it is now, the success of Slack and HipChat is a danger to communication on the Internet.

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#162

Post by berkes »

trjordan wrote: post #83
Albright wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is kind of a frustrating answer, because Slack's UX sucks. Its desktop app is just a wrapped web page; the fonts and colors match nobody's operating system; the fffffffffffffffffriendly scroll bar; all the cutesy messages and iconography; "Reconnecting…"; etc, etc. Yes, I understand that it's still friendlier to use than IRC, but there's a middle ground between "easy to use" and "still looks and works like a pr…

UX is not design. The fonts, colors, and silly features like emoji are gravy. UX includes the cold experience. If you sign up with just one user, Slack creates a couple rooms and has a bot talk to you. UX includes history management. Slack makes everything searchable and is good enough that most people can find what they want. UX includes ways to level up your proficiency with the tool. Slack doesn't force integratio…

US is also responsiveness and snappy feeling. None of which slack get right at all. The native app is merely a wrapper around their web-view, yet takes around 15 seconds to load. Then eats > 320 Mb of RAM and continues to eat more (it leaks somewhere). The web-app itself is far worse wrt speed and resource-usage.

That is unacceptable, especially when you look at the alternatives it replaces: IRC, XMPP/Jabber and whatnot.

I guess it mostly comes down to Slack choosing the "wrong" stack here: Web-technology is, as is shown quite often, simply not ready for such heavy UX/UIs. Sure, it can be done, but when compared to the simplicity and speed of "native" it simply does not cut it. Yet.

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#163

Post by TeMPOraL »

lfowles wrote: post #104
kefka wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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?

If he's a sysadmin then yes. What he described is setting up communications infrastructure.

Someone set up Slack for the company. The same person could have set up an internal IRC server.

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#164

Post by darklajid »

mugsie wrote: post #51
ashark wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does your mobile IRC client notify you (push message) when you're mentioned or receive a private message, but only when you're idle or offline on your desktop client?

yes. and it is consistently faster than slacks push notifications.

Honest question: Which client would that be? I'm looking for a solution myself.

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#165

Post by dvanduzer »

berkes wrote: post #162
trjordan wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UX is not design. The fonts, colors, and silly features like emoji are gravy. UX includes the cold experience. If you sign up with just one user, Slack creates a couple rooms and has a bot talk to you. UX includes history management. Slack makes everything searchable and is good enough that most people can find what they want. UX includes ways to level up your proficiency with the tool. Slack doesn't force integratio…

US is also responsiveness and snappy feeling. None of which slack get right at all . The native app is merely a wrapper around their web-view, yet takes around 15 seconds to load. Then eats > 320 Mb of RAM and continues to eat more (it leaks somewhere). The web-app itself is far worse wrt speed and resource-usage. That is unacceptable, especially when you look at the alternatives it replaces: IRC, XMPP/Jabber and wha…

Regardless of which platform you're talking about, the Slack app is emphatically not merely a wrapper around the web view. The resource consumption of their various client interfaces can be improved, but what are you trying to compare it to? In that particular context, a better comparison of any of the Slack client apps (native/web) would be Outlook.

Slack is not replacing IRC or XMPP at all. Slack uses these protocols as part of a groupware suite. As discussed elsewhere in the thread, IRC-at-companies draws mixed reactions. XMPP is a protocol that has seen very wide adoption in the enterprise, with many implementations from a variety of vendors, with a variety of resource consumption issues. XMPP is very much a web technology in the sense you're talking about.

And you are correct that it proved to be a very bad stack for something like Slack, when Google first tried it in 2009: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wave

If you really think Slack has made poor technology choices, I'd suggest reading what Stewart had to say on the subject in this interview: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/182287/The_story_of_Glitc...

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#166

Post by vacri »

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…

Not all criticisms of Slack are "Use IRC instead!". Albright suggested HipChat as a better example.

I do care what Slack looks like though - the chat window has so much wasted whitespace that it doesn't show a lot of comms; add in a space-guzzling integration or two and it gets really hard to follow a conversation. Hipchat uses space a lot more efficiently.

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#167

Post by lmm »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #159
lmm wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Slack offers both an IRC and an XMPP interface. I don't think it would be possible to implement all the functionality over IRC. I do agree that the protocol should be an open standard though.

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#168

Post by kefka »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #163
lfowles wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And, I just created a new product. That's exactly the point. Is this what your day job is paying you to do?

If he's a sysadmin then yes. What he described is setting up communications infrastructure. Someone set up Slack for the company. The same person could have set up an internal IRC server.

I do a great deal of R&D and work with emerging technologies.

I'm also one of the leads for IoT rollout. In essence, I look at many sectors and areas at the same time, and determine how it can be used in our org.

I was looking at message passing using IRC as a form of command and control. The hackers have used it successfully for controlling a force of DDoS clients; why not a server farm? I know that Ansible, chef, and others exist. But IRC is human readable, meaning status messages can be passively read.

Pretty much, I have a dream job. I can get funding for pretty much anything I want, have access to petabyte FS, access to 3 supers(HPC, not clusters), multiple clusters, and more. And then I'm asked, "what can you make with that?"

You learn quick in those situations.

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#169

Post by ashark »

darklajid wrote: post #164
mugsie wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes. and it is consistently faster than slacks push notifications.

Honest question: Which client would that be? I'm looking for a solution myself.

I looked in to it after that answer. Colloquy[1] was the top hit for my search, and yeah, it does it, but (of course) you've got to have a bouncer[2] running all the time and connected to any channels you want to monitor. Probably pretty nice once it's set up, assuming there's a way to run it on a cheap VM or Raspi or something rather than your workstation or laptop. Looks like their mobile client attempts to register its device ID with bouncers in a channel when it connects, so that's automatic. Not exactly a competitor with what Slack and similar are doing—not having to set up and manage this sort of thing to achieve those services' features is exactly why people pay them—but seems like a nice solution if you prefer IRC.

[1] http://colloquy.info [2] http://colloquy.mobi/bouncers.html

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#170

Post by kefka »

derefr wrote: post #126
kefka wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh please. The tools I use rapidly allow me to chain all sorts of stuff together to create things that surpass even Slack and other apps. Where is a Slack that can do "sensitivity calculation" to alert users of possibly hostile tone? That's right. Not created yet. Give me a half hour and I could have the beginning of that. I also could get translation facilities built in so that English/French/German/Spanish could be…

You know that you can write bots for Slack just like you can write bots for IRC, right? This isn't a point on the side of IRC. Slack starts out with more features, but is just as extensible.

But when I have to pay to play, I'll pass.

It's a fools errand to extend a private platform like Slack. They're already adding IRC features to their system, along with running a modified IRC bouncer.

Why play catch-up or copy-target when I can just use IRC directly?

Hell, I could do what they're doing for $1/user/month just by hooking a RADIUS server up to my nickserv. Easy peasy.

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