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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

#191

Post by AsyncAwait »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #168
AsyncAwait wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a freelancer, I have EXACTLY this problem, so I started hacking away on my own solution. Don't want to shamelessly promote myself here, but if you're interested, link is in my profile.

A few comments that I hope are constructive. Looking at your page, I'm not confident you're avoiding the issue by which these tools proliferate: https://xkcd.com/927/ Your users and their clients are still going to be using Slack and email, but it seems like you're giving me one more thing to log into. You write: > Schedule your time spent and group distracting reminders and notifications in one place If this "one pl…

Great comments, I'll try to address them:

- Your users and their clients are still going to be using Slack and email, but it seems like you're giving me one more thing to log into

That is not the aim, the real goal here is exactly what you state next i.e you'll be able to (securely via OAuth, so you can also revoke access anytime) log into your Slack, Basecamp etc. and Calmbird will be the one 'dashboard' where you log into, kind of like having a social network client that supports Twitter, Facebook etc.

> My clients don't want automatic emails, especially from templates/digests. They want me to hand-craft them as if it was the most important thing in my life.

That is very true from personal experience, this is a feature where you'll craft a sort of an 'emergency' email yourself in advance and when you indicate in calmbird that you're working, it'll send if off to your client if there's an email from them, optionally with the latest updates. It's not a 'machine-generated' email in the traditional sense and this feature is in my current version entirely optional, which is how it will stay at launch, (if it stays at all, I'll certainly be thinking a lot about how can this be improved, there's no point if it's not going to be useful.)

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#192

Post by cookiecaper »

piquadrat wrote: post #20

Is that really happening that open source communities use Slack as their primary communications channel? I haven't seen that happening in the communities I participate in (Python/Django/...). What I do see is that more and more communities switch from IRC to Slack as the primary "sync" channel (while still maintaining mailing lists, bug trackers and the like). And as much as I hate it, the success can't be denied. Es…

Slack is successful because IRC web clients are so cumbersome and annoying. Most of the things Slack provides easily could've been provided in a web-based IRC client, but where's the upside for Slack in that?

By adopting an incompatible web model, they lock people and their messages in, and can charge per user in the room. As a good IRC client, the most they could get away with is a subscription charge per client, which has the downside of creating a barrier to entry that limits adoption (requires everyone who wants to use it to pay, v. a central employer or organization that can compel people onto a chat platform).

Users like web-based because it means that they just click a button and the thing they want magically appears with no install process. Companies like web-based because it allows them to box all the secret sauce behind a server that can't be introspected. There's no risk of someone cracking their program and distributing it for free, and they get to keep complete control over the crown jewels, which are now and always have been the data that the program purports to manage.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#193

Post by cat199 »

golergka wrote: post #35

I was expecting Stallman-style advocacy against closed-source as a principle; pleasantly surprised by the arguments. Synchronous communication, indeed, is bad for the main communication channel. However, as a secondary communication channel, it can serve important needs. When people are looking not to just get a single issue resolved, but to form a community, this community is often based on informal communication an…

> I was expecting Stallman-style advocacy against closed-source as a principle; pleasantly surprised by the arguments.

Is this a problem?

Ostensibly one should hope to be able to communicate online in the same manner that one does offline: without paying an intermediary

Further, if the 'natural trend' of economics is towards commoditization of products, why then are we abandoning those things which facillitated decentralization in order to support another entities profit motives?

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#194

Post by daenney »

NateDad wrote: post #144
_jal wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To have all the features you get for free out of slack, you have to do a lot of work and maintenance to get out of IRC and mailing lists. Mailing lists by themselves are terrible, because there's no history. You can't scroll up to find context for the conversation. You can get public archives, but then where you actually use the mailing list and where you go to look at history are completely separate, which is a terr…

> IRC also has the multi-login problem - it gets confused if I log in from my phone and my laptop. To get a persistent history of IRC requires running an external service which is way beyond most users.

This part I really do find annoying about IRC. I use IRC by far the most but this still gets me. Even if you run it in a screen somewhere it's a hassle from a mobile device. There's solutions for all of it, but you have to string a series of things together to get to something just about every other option offers you out of the box. Unless you have a particular need for IRC or have used it for a while and know how to deal with it, the other options are more appealing to newcomers. Depending on how young your project or community is that can make all the difference.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#195

Post by baldfat »

cortesoft wrote: post #37
exelius wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So get a better IRC client? Really not hard to do things like syntax formatting and auto link follow (GUI versions of IRCII had plugins for this in the late 90s, so it's not like it's even a novel idea).

A better IRC client isn't going to provide chat history.

We are talking Open Source Project Communication not small group communication.

IRC and FreeNode channels have been the standard for communication and not for archival purposes. I use an IRC bouncer with my home server and I never look back through the thousands of communications except to see a reply to my question.

Why does a Open Source Community channel need archived communication unless it is just a few developers only chat?

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#196

Post by Frondo »

jay-anderson wrote: post #164
dade_ wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was at a dev meetup for Python: I really thought he was joking when he said, what is IRC? And then I realized that we have a whole generation of devs that have no idea what IRC is or how to use it. Amazing the amount of knowledge and experience lost between a single generation.

I've tried to give IRC a chance a few times, but it always felt like there were a few too many odd little things to learn before I could be productive and comfortable. I didn't get used to it and dropped it. It never felt inviting. I use slack at work and love it. I fully agree that it isn't that different from IRC and I hate that it's another walled garden (of sorts), but it fixes a lot of the little annoyance in de…

I've been IRCing for 24 years. I know about bouncers, different clients, etc., and I still prefer Slack to IRC.

I like knowing that it's going to handle unicode properly, in all cases, for everyone on the Slack channel. I like that it handles right-to-left text for everyone reading.

I like not having to ever think about, is my bouncer down? I also like not having to think about, where am I going to run my bouncer? It's nice not having to think about that stuff at all. I've got a lot on my plate, keeping a bouncer up and running somewhere (just so I don't lose history!) doesn't need to be another thing I do.

I like the plugins, the integrations with various other services. I like the convenience and polish. No IRC client compares to Slack for integrations and polish. It takes friction out of my daily chat experience.

I've even moved some private irc channel chats to Slack channels, because it's just a more pleasant experience in 2017. No regrets about any of that.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#197

Post by lucb1e »

joaodlf wrote: post #125

Forums. I don't know why the internet got tired of them, even when they sometimes fit the bill so well. Slack is chat. Mailing lists are far too outdated. Forums are good, and some good people out there are still developing them.

The forums I visited all died, but none replaced them (and I kinda miss forums). There are still some active forums that I know of, like Factorio's (a modern game, not one from 2001 when forums were still hot). They have a subreddit which is active as well (though less), but the forum format still works fine for them.

New services replaced many things that forums were used for, but not all.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#198

Post by cat199 »

s73ver wrote: post #115
isaiahg wrote: post #16

I don't know why didn't just evolve irc. Feature wise slack doesn't really bring much new. It just has a good interface. If someone made an irc client as easy to use as slack then we'd have our answer.

"Feature wise slack doesn't really bring much new. It just has a good interface." That's a pretty huge feature. Never underestimate how making something more usable increases it's popularity.

Really - what is sooo unusable about IRC?

Get a good GUI client, enter some parameters into a text bar, click 'ok', then chat. exactly the same process as a web browser..

The real problem is the 'endless summer' of tablet-era people who confuse the 'interweb' with the 'internet'. There used to be much more general community advocacy and understanding of promoting open communications 'baked in' to the internet culture which has been eroded by crass commercialization - this is the real problem that needs to be attacked...

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#199

Post by wonderous »

cortesoft wrote: post #39
wonderous wrote: post #31

Does Slack's terms of use forbidden creating an off platform archive? If not, given that searchable archives are one of the ways Slack makes money, makes me wonder why there's not an open source way to pull the chats and archive them in a way that's cheaper and independent of Slack.

Like http://slackarchive.io/ ?

Is an example of a third-party archiving chat, though doesn't appear to be open source; possible it is though, but if it I'm unable to find the code.

Re: Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications

#200

Post by romaniv »

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…

In the good old days of ICQ and Jabber you could install a client that would integrate several protocols into a single lightweight UI (e.g. Miranda IM). Unfortunately the new wave of messengers is much more successful at guarding their protocols against such integrations.

That said, I wonder what's Discord's official stance on such things. Their bread and butter is voice chat, and they seem to be fairly open minded. Maybe they will eventually provide a public API for basic text messages.

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