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Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

dave.cheney.net

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Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#81

Post by drey08 »

caseysoftware wrote: post #5

Good points but the bigger problem for me is the lack of an archive. You only have the last 10k (?) messages and that includes public and private messages. If you have a mildly active project, messages may only be available for a month and you lose the history of the project. That makes it an awful support option too.

Just a note: if you go from free to paid, you can recover those lost messages. They're never actually deleted, you just can't view messages after the 10k limit in the free version.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#82

Post by abalashov »

_jal wrote: post #68
Pxtl wrote: post #52

It's frustrating that the choice seems to be between modern closed tools like Slack and Hangouts and antiquated open tools like IRC and mailing lists.

Question for you: I hear this a lot, in terms of older tools being considered obsolete. Other than the natural human tendency towards novelty and the network effects, what, exactly, is obsolete about mailing lists or IRC? What features are missing in IRC that Slack has for synchronous discussion? (I'll start: animated dancing pigs out of the box and the need to write/plug in your own archiver.) What limitations do ma…

> What limitations do mailing lists impose on open source development that are not present in other tools?

None, in my opinion. On the contrary, they are the only tool that demand a structure — just by the nature of e-mail messages — that is coherent enough to be highly useful when searching archives later.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#83

Post by alpha_squared »

caseysoftware wrote: post #5

Good points but the bigger problem for me is the lack of an archive. You only have the last 10k (?) messages and that includes public and private messages. If you have a mildly active project, messages may only be available for a month and you lose the history of the project. That makes it an awful support option too.

I completely agree with this. I'm part of a group that's trying to help people in the local community learn programming and we're using Slack to chat outside of any scheduled sessions. We're at over 1000 members in Slack now and are seeing messages disappear before the two-week mark. We don't collect any money from our members and Slack's pricing model makes it unfeasible for us. At this point, Slack's search feature is hit or miss when searching for anything over a week old.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#84

Post by patrickg_zill »

simopaa wrote: post #79
patrickg_zill wrote: post #67

Mattermost is an open source alternative to Slack btw. And Discourse is pretty great, though much more like a forum.

We have been using http://rocket.chat at work and it works beautifully. Slack was never an option for it was not self-hostable

Also a good choice.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#85

Post by abalashov »

branchly2 wrote: post #75

Forums work better. Using IRC/Slack in place of forums is like using a wiki in place of real documentation.

It's much worse. A wiki still consists of pages of documents, even if they're kind of improvisational and perhaps incomplete. A chat log is just a log of people chatting, with all the free-wheeling and meandering conversational style that entails.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#86

Post by VLM »

kuschku wrote: post #57
VLM wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just run your IRC client in screen/tmux like we've done for a quarter century. The real advantage of slack isn't even client its stuff like massive logging for e-discovery and single sign on integration. Admittedly not terribly appealing for FOSS but once you use it at work... Also integrations in general are smoother in slack than in IRC. Someone has already written the bot and its a click away to install and it gen…

> The real advantage of slack isn't even client its stuff like massive logging for e-discovery and single sign on integration. Admittedly not terribly appealing for FOSS but once you use it at work... Which can also be done with IRC clients. This is a video of a search system I built for the Quassel IRC client: https://dl.kuschku.de/videos/2016-09-16_04-03-36.mp4 Quassel is a distributed system, so you have a bouncer…

Encapsulates this era as the battleground of silo'd "as a service" vs "can be done"

For example I can have jenkins email build fails to slack in, oh, probably less than two minutes, I've done it before. From memory I make a custom email addrs in slack and tell slack which channel to feed it into, and then add that address to my jenkins that already sent buildSpam.

In IRC I could do it... google implies there's a ZenIRCBot project on github and probably many others. Probably there are bots and tools that google didn't immediately find.

Its not rocket surgery to use fetchmail and some kind of Perl IRC library to simply POP everything out of a mailbox into a directory /tmp/wtf and probably about 3 lines of perl to read all the files in /tmp/wtf, connect to irc on some channel, output what it found, and if successful delete the emails from /tmp/wtf. Then put fetchmail and the 3 line perl script into cron and away we go.

Looks like Zapier is kinda in between "I could do it" and "AAS"

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#87

Post by finid »

27182818284 wrote: post #58
PaulHoule wrote: post #47

What drives me nuts is that there are so many of these things. I know groups that (for business or pleasure) use Slack, Discord, Skype, Google Hangouts, IRC, etc. All of these clients are a bit more obstrusive than they need to be in terms of pop-up notifications, software updates, cpu, memory, transfer, etc. They all screw up enough that there's always a little apprehension that something will go wrong when you get…

>It is one thing to deal with one of these things, but when you have to install ten to get The modern office large office is pretty bad in this respect. Really not uncommon to see things like • Need to have Slack open • Need to keep an eye on Basecamp/pm software • Need to have Outlook open / check in on for email and calendar invites • Need Skype open because not everyone uses Slack • GitLab is open in another tab I…

I don't even bother logging out, ever. I just have them open in different tabs.

Imagine having about 7 tabs open. By the time I'm finished with the last tab, something new has come up on the first tab I checked. Huge waste of time. I'm trying to wean myself from all these services, but it's not easy.

This or that project is on GitHub, but join the developers on Slack. And I hate Slack.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#88

Post by artursapek »

rdiddly wrote: post #15
artursapek wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easier to ask for help NOW and get customized answers NOW than to dig through a wiki/documentation for the answer.

Proving the point that someone then has to repeat the content of the docs.

Of course - I'm just saying it's easier for the customer/consumer.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#89

Post by rco8786 »

alpha_squared wrote: post #83
caseysoftware wrote: post #5

Good points but the bigger problem for me is the lack of an archive. You only have the last 10k (?) messages and that includes public and private messages. If you have a mildly active project, messages may only be available for a month and you lose the history of the project. That makes it an awful support option too.

I completely agree with this. I'm part of a group that's trying to help people in the local community learn programming and we're using Slack to chat outside of any scheduled sessions. We're at over 1000 members in Slack now and are seeing messages disappear before the two-week mark. We don't collect any money from our members and Slack's pricing model makes it unfeasible for us. At this point, Slack's search feature…

With respect - Slack is a business that runs on a freemium model. You can't expect them to handle your (large) user base for free just because.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#90

Post by zachlatta »

caseysoftware wrote: post #5

Good points but the bigger problem for me is the lack of an archive. You only have the last 10k (?) messages and that includes public and private messages. If you have a mildly active project, messages may only be available for a month and you lose the history of the project. That makes it an awful support option too.

If you have a nonprofit for your project, you can also get on their nonprofit plan. At https://hackclub.com we get unlimited archival without paying for this reason.
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