Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 397 posts

Re: Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack

#251

Post by taurath »

pyre wrote: post #193
creshal wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the servers available for it suck. All the clients available for it suck. I know, I'm using it daily too, but I don't see it gaining more traction that it already has ever again.

What sucks about (e.g.) Adium? I haven't had any major issues with it other than the fact that it doesn't seem to be too actively updated. My biggest complaint is lack of protocol support for other things (e.g. GTalk vs. Hangouts), but that's on libpurple, and the lack of open protocols by the providers.

Adium has a UX and UI from the 90s, for one.

Re: Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack

#252

Post by coroutines »

scrollaway wrote: post #184
zilean wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe twitch uses ircv3.

Wow, you're correct. I did not know that. Fun!

Twitch is fairly-conforming to IRCv3... they don't prefix their non-standard capabilities with their domain in CAP LS. :>

I'm sad because I applied to Twitch directly stating what I'd want to work on with the IRC portal and never got a response. My entire work history is IRC. XD

Re: Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack

#253

Post by taurath »

ShaneBonich wrote: post #21

It's already here - Bitrix24. Light years ahead of Slack. Free for unlimited users without silly restrictions on search and other crap. And GASP it comes with actual work tools beyond IM.

It looks like it has 500 features on the screen and it tries to do everything for you. Its not even in the same ballpark as slack.

Re: Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack

#254

Post by caf »

scrollaway wrote: post #246
caf wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Offline messages is a server issue, though - in principle there's no reason why you couldn't have a server that remembers offline messages and passes them to the client when it reconnects, framing them as regular IRC messages.

There is, actually. IRC has no concept of timestamps. IRC has no concept of foreign metadata, even, so shoehorning isn't even possible without looking horrible. IRCv3 fixes all that.

Prefixing a date/timestamp unless the client has asked for IRCv3 timestamps is reasonable.

Re: Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack

#255

Post by coroutines »

creshal wrote: post #99
scrollaway wrote: post #78

A hundred different chat systems mentioned here. None of them compatible with one another. Well, I guess a couple of them have IRC gateways, but you have to actually set those up. Gee, wouldn't it be nice if you could pick and choose your UI? Pick and choose your "integrations", your "plugins", your client, etc without having to lose your entire userbase, history, contacts? Some sort of open protocol. Urgh, I've been…

> Some sort of open protocol. XMPP seems to be rather dead, for various reasons, and no real contender for a replacement has sprung up. I guess there always is, and always will be IRC…

I remember like 8 years ago my friends and I avoided XMPP because XML + the overhead of XML.

Now we have more bandwidth, and sending XMPP as a server is negligible.

I just would prefer JSON to XML. :-)

Re: Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack

#256

Post by llimllib »

icebraining wrote: post #58
llimllib wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a slack alternative that can never support search truly a slack alternative?

"Practical techniques for searches on encrypted data" (2000) http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~dawnsong/papers/se.pdf Highly-Scalable Searchable Symmetric Encryption with Support for Boolean Queries (2013) http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/169

I admit that I get a bit blurry-eyed reading those, but I hope that they do in fact prove practical and gain implementation usable to everyday programmers.

Re: Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack

#257

Post by rekoros »

taurath wrote: post #249
rekoros wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I don't think so. The main thing the owners of big networks are afraid of is spam. We provide a ridiculously expensive way to connect, say, Slack to Skype, which is ==great for Skype==, from almost every possible angle. It means Skype users can stay on Skype instead of switching to someone else's Slack team.

In that case great for skype, bad for slack. Someone, somewhere will decide they'd rather force those customers to use their service/client, or else they'd have an open protocol in the first place.

There's a huge compliance problem with working in someone else's Slack team -- you own none of the resulting data and you don't control access on your end.

Email is much better in this way, since everyone gets a copy.

With Sameroom you essentially retain the carbon copy semantics of email, but with real-time collaboration. So, I'd argue that it's great for Slack.

Re: Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack

#258

Post by coroutines »

Klathmon wrote: post #25
tribaal wrote: post #2

If only there was a well supported, standard, open and interoperable text messaging protocol (with multiple implementations) that companies could host themselves... Oh wait, IRC.

You mean the same IRC that doesn't include basic features like the ability to receive messages if you aren't currently connected? The same IRC that has horrible scaling issues once you try to really use it? The same IRC that is a miserable experience to setup, administer, search, and even use? Stop touting IRC as the "perfect" chat system. It's far from it.

Traditionally offline message caching would be the responsibility of a bouncer, or something like memoserv. There is an interest to make this responsibility part of the server in IRCv3, though.

IRC scales much, much better than Slack. Unreal or InspIRCd or Charybdis whatever - Slack fails miserably for hundreds of thousands of users in one "team"/network.

I do agree administering/configuring IRC servers has to get nicer. I personally want an IRC server that exposes a REST API for online configuration (no rehashing of a config file).

Re: Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack

#259

Post by BlahBoy3 »

luckydude wrote: post #242

This is why I sort of hate open source. Slack is doing a great job, their prices are right. So why is it OK to destroy that? With what is going to be not as good stuff? I'll get down voted to hell but come on. It's cheap, it's good, so why not let the guy make a living? And for the record I don't even know who the guy is (or woman is). I just hate the "it's cool, lets rip it off attitude". Because the ripoff is rarel…

So you have a problem with open source putting out alternatives, but you're perfectly fine with the free market, in which companies put out competing products all the time? I'm not trying to start a flame war here, I'm just curious as to why you think that a community of programmers working together to develop a competing product is any worse than a company like HipChat doing the same thing. I, for one, welcome this kind of collaboration.

Re: Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack

#260

Post by thearn4 »

parfe wrote: post #102

In my org we started using slack and the people who talk the most say the least. Important conversations already took place on our internal jabber server. People with nothing to say never connected, but now with animated gifs and embedded youtube they use slack for entertainment. Never thought I'd see Eternal September in a professional environment.

In our team, we created a "random" channel for animated gifs, unrelated links, etc. to keep from cluttering the work-related ones. So far, it seems to have worked well.
Post reply on HN