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Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

blog.okturtles.com

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Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#171

Post by woof »

bachmeier wrote: post #100
woof wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$6.67/month is less than $0.33/day (~20 workdays/month)! That's an trivial amount to pay for effective communications in my book.

You pay that for every Slack user, no matter how many or few messages you exchange with them. I don't think someone else is going to pay $6.67 to replace ten email messages.

"I frequently interact with at least 25 people just to do my job"

Frequently, not ten messages in total.

Email works fine for non important sporadic communication.

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#172

Post by lmm »

Arathorn wrote: post #98
lmm wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I searched for axolotl and got some cute pictures but not much information. Why this thing rather than OTR?

OTR has some major shortcomings - in the classic implementation, it doesn't do group chat and it requires both parties to be online at the same time to synchronise the cryptographic ratchet. The best explanation of why Axolotl is better is https://whispersystems.org/blog/advanced-ratcheting - or if you prefer a more comprehensive spec, we've published one at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/olm.html . Anyone wanting to k…

Hi indeed.

Are there any plans for formal standardisation, review or the like? The docs look cool but at this point I'm suspicious of any single-vendor cryptography.

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#173

Post by justinhj »

chris_wot wrote: post #143
justinhj wrote: post #134

I was recently at a small development studio that closed down. We used slack to communicate and liked it. I set up an alumni team and the whole team joined up to keep in touch and it's still active months later. Is anyone going to argue that if I'd sent out the irc channel that anyone would have tried to connect?

Why wouldn't they?

Because I worked with people with varying levels of technical ability. Slack is so much easier to setup and get everyone to use than irc.

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#174

Post by brenschluss »

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.

You're saying: the efficacy of a UX can be predicted entirely by the UI's adherence to other UI.

Which is also an erroneous statement. I use vi(m) on OSX. vi's UI "does not match the standard appearance and interface of the rest of the operating system."

Thus, I predict that VI has a horrible UX. However, I am incorrect.

Why is this so?

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#175

Post by berkes »

dvanduzer wrote: post #165
berkes wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 protoco…

> 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.

This differs for everyone. For me, it merely replaces XMPP/IRC: group-chat. That is in the last 3 teams where we used slack.

Others, and I guess mostly people who live in their email-inbox, may see Slack as a replacement for their Mail Suite. Again others may see it as a replacement for teleconferencing/skype.

It really depends where you come from. Me, I come from a simple, integrated IRC and XMPP client. Now we all use Slack and I have a poor experience compared to the Just Works[tm] chat (through empathy) on Ubuntu.

* Slack crashes 2, 3 times per week. Mostly memory issues. Empathy never crashed on me, that I can remember.

* Empathy is, AFAIK always on. I switch off Slack when not working because (1) it abuses resources and (2) it addds another icon to my toolbar (empathy integrates in Ubuntu's message icon).

* Empathy starts whenever I start my OS. Slack can be configured to do so. But when it does, its slow startup time and CPU-gobbling while starting makes my desktop appear sluggish.

I'm comparing it to a well integrated, thin and snappy XMPP client, which is what Slack replaces for me. And Slack comes out poor. All over.

Re: Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

#176

Post by Arathorn »

lmm wrote: post #172
Arathorn wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTR has some major shortcomings - in the classic implementation, it doesn't do group chat and it requires both parties to be online at the same time to synchronise the cryptographic ratchet. The best explanation of why Axolotl is better is https://whispersystems.org/blog/advanced-ratcheting - or if you prefer a more comprehensive spec, we've published one at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/olm.html . Anyone wanting to k…

Hi indeed. Are there any plans for formal standardisation, review or the like? The docs look cool but at this point I'm suspicious of any single-vendor cryptography.

yup, we will get it properly reviewed once complete.
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