201–210 of 536 posts
Can we just go back to aim? I really hate having one damn view for channels, so if I'm talking to two people I have to constantly switch back and forth. I still don't get how these kinds of tools get such a big following.
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No, email is terrible. There's no history. You can't "scroll up" to see what people were talking about. You can't link to another specific email to reference it (yes, there's archive services, but then you have to go dig through an archive to try to find a horridly formatted email to link to, which is completely separate from the normal consumption platform).
I actually argued here recently that email was hard to switch away from because of the history. You can keep your emails forever. I have emails from 2007 sitting in my inbox. And if I want to keep them, I can download them with IMAP or POP. If I send an email to five people and they remember to hit "reply all", well that's a conversation, isn't it? And if I need to show someone an email they weren't party to original…
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…
On one large free software project, we adopted Mattermost (an open source / self-hosted equivalent of Slack). We went from ~12 active users and ~50 lesser active users, to ~ 100 active and ~ 500 lesser active users. I agree that more folks should consider moving away from IRC. The sign-up process for Mattermost is easy. It's intuitive, cross-platform, mobile-friendly, etc. While we geeks are used to IRC, onboarding p…
For anyone who'd like to try an open source Slack-alternative, you can start in less than a minute with auto-deploy via Bitnami: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKqHWqrAgpk&t=9s
Goes to AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle Cloud, all data under your control, Mattermost Team Edition runs under MIT license.
Also, check out our new React Native mobile apps: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-mobile
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.…
Many of these complaints are just as valid for any business or organization trying to function as a modern software-based org in this day and age. You have remote workers, flexible schedules, people traveling everywhere, all doing knowledge work that depends upon sustained focus and reaching a flow state. All of which Slack and synchronous chat detract from. Slack just happens to be easy and convenient, so orgs end u…
We have built a product around what we call "Deep Collaboration". Deep Collaboration is fundamentally asynchronous in nature. The term is derived from Cal Newport's book on Deep Work.
Deep Collaboration allows teams to collaborate asynchronously thus enabling Deep Work (which group chat basically kills). If you read his book (highly recommended btw) you will see how individuals (and organizations) can produce transformative results via Deep Work. Unfortunately, his solutions to actually obtaining the uninterrupted time required for Deep Work is unrealistic in today's collaborative environments.
That's where Deep Collaboration comes in. https://tmail21.com.
Would love any feedback from the HN community.
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"log in to slack" vs. "deploy 3 services in the cloud by yourself and force everyone to use a specific irc client (good luck)" There's a reason people like slack so much. It does a ton of stuff out of the box with no headaches. Nobody wants to maintain all that stuff.
> There's a reason people like slack so much. It does a ton of stuff out of the box with no headaches. Nobody wants to maintain all that stuff. So instead of paying someone to maintain it, you pay someone to maintain it who keeps all your data from you and prevents you from accessing it, and who admits he’ll read all your stuff. How is that better again? That said, IRCCloud already does it for free, in the cloud, jus…
Slack doesn't prevent you from accessing your data, in fact they explicitly built exporting features.
We're talking about open source, so reading your stuff shouldn't be a problem. For proprietary, maybe, but even then, reading someone's private slack info would be highly damaging to their brand, and to what benefit?
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.
and Telegram and Wire and Riot and Semaphor and Tox and... Plenty of non-closed tools.
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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…